Consider this scenario: You've just purchased the latest smartphone and excitement fills your air as you unbox it. But when you turn it on, you're met with a defective screen, malfunctioning buttons, and every built-in app behaving erratically. Thanks to quality assurance (QA) tools, such an ordeal is extremely unlikely. Before the device reaches your hands, both its hardware and software undergo rigorous testing by a QA team.

Quality Assurance plays a vital role in our daily lives. When a product is released, it must pass through a series of tests to meet Quality Assurance standards. From waking up to watching your favorite shows at the end of the day, QA tools help create a seamless user experience. QA teams work tirelessly to ensure products are high-quality, functional, and consistent in their usability.

So what are QA tools? The answer varies depending on the industry, but when it comes to software testing, QA tools play an essential role in helping developers test their code, identify bugs, and confirm that their software functions as intended. QA tools typically include:

Automated Testing Software

Code Review Tools

Bug Tracking Tools

Testing Frameworks

Performance Monitoring

You might also consider a QA tool to be any type of tool that helps a QA team streamline their testing process. With QA tools, QA testers can help prevent crashes, data loss, and usability errors from software.

Read on for a roundup of our favorite QA tools for testing automation and workflow.

Automate Your QA Testing Workflow with Ghost Inspector

Our 14-day free trial gives you and your team full access. Create tests in minutes. No credit card required.

Ghost Inspector is a web-based, no-code/low-code automated testing and monitoring tool that helps developers and QA testers manage the overall performance of their websites and web apps. With Ghost Inspector, you can create and run automated web tests by navigating through your user interface and recording user interactions in-browser. Create test cases automatically through interaction with your website or web app—test buttons, forms, accessibility, usability, and more. You can also utilize Ghost Inspector's user-friendly test recorder and drag-and-drop features for easy test building and editing.

Ghost Inspector also features more advanced testing tools for the experienced QA engineer, including JavaScript support and continuous integration (CI) tie-ins. It's an ideal addition for QA teams that collaborate with differing expertise. Because Ghost Inspector allows users to create and maintain tests without requiring coding ability, adding this tool to your QA testing strategy allows for testing equity amongst your testers and developers.

Key Features

  • No-code test automation
  • Intuitive interface and usability for both QA novices and coding experts
  • Simple test recorder and drag-and-drop test editing features
  • Complete end-to-end testing capabilities
  • Support for complex scenarios with smart logic
  • Unlimited parallel testing
  • Visual testing
  • Responsiveness testing
  • Geolocation testing: available for 16 regions globally
  • Reusable test sequences that can be easily imported and exported
  • Easy accessibility testing
  • Integrations with platforms like GitHub, Jenkins, Slack, Jira, and more.
  • API and plugins for additional flexibility
  • Customer support, live demos, advanced documentation

Pricing

  • $109/mo (billed annually) – 10,000 test runs/mo, 5 team members
  • $225/mo (billed annually) – 30,000 test runs/mo, 15 team members
  • $449/mo (billed annually) – 100,000 test runs/mo, 40 team members
  • Enterprise – contact for details

2. Selenium

Selenium is a powerful, open-source framework that provides developers with a variety of tools and libraries for web browser automation. Developers can write test scripts with programming languages like Java, Python, or JavaScript with the ability to customize test steps and manage complex test cases. Selenium also integrates with numerous other tools, testing frameworks, and reporting software.

It's important to note that in order to work with Selenium, users must have a solid understanding of how to work with programming languages. Additionally, QA teams are required to download a driver for each browser being tested on, so the setup and initial costs to get started with Selenium may be prohibitive. But Selenium does integrate with no-code test automation software like Ghost Inspector for QA teams looking for a combination of powerful programming ability and user-friendly test processes. And not only is Selenium free to use, but it's also one of the most flexible, multifaceted automation testing QA tools on the market.

Key Features

  • Free open-source software for continuous testing
  • Cross-browser capabilities: versatile web-browser support includes Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Edge
  • Portability: works with multiple operating systems like Mac, Windows, Linux, and UNIX
  • Multiple third-party testing framework integrations, including Selenium-Grid, SauceLabs, JUnit, NUnit, and more
  • Multi-language compatibility for ease of use no matter your chosen program language
  • Parallel testing capabilities
  • Highly available resources, documentation, and video content from an active developer and tester community
  • Extensive APIs, plugins, and extensions for flexible usage

Pricing

FREE