DevOps is the discipline of shortening the software delivery lifecycle by building tools and systems that allow changes to be developed continually using an iterative process. It brings dev and ops teams closer together, tightening feedback loops and allowing work to progress more smoothly through the delivery pipeline.
DevOps is often associated with concepts such as CI/CD, IaC, containers, and cloud, but testing is also a crucial part of successful DevOps implementations. Selecting the right testing tools ensures you can efficiently validate changes and maintain consistent quality standards, even as development velocity increases.
For this article, we’ve gathered together 20 test-oriented DevOps tools and DevOps testing solutions that you can use to catch bugs and errors before they reach users. We’ll explain what each tool contributes to the QA process so you can find the right options for your projects.
Manual and automated tests are a cornerstone of software quality and security. Unit tests, end-to-end tests, linters, vulnerability scanners, and software composition analysis (SCA) engines allow you to demonstrate that your projects function properly, not just today but also after future changes.
Test suites also provide valuable feedback to developers, removing pressure from dev cycles by letting code authors confirm that their work doesn’t introduce any regressions.
To ensure you can achieve these testing outcomes, you need tools that can integrate robustly with your processes. Look for options that are compatible with your existing source control, CI/CD, and IDE solutions, allowing devs to access results within the platforms where they’re already working.
DevOps testing tools also need to offer clear documentation, dependable performance, and good support options so developers can use them effectively without becoming frustrated.
Let’s dig into the DevOps testing tools we’ve selected. We chose them because they collectively cover most major test classes and are either popular choices or promising merging options.
Because different software types have varying test requirements, your project may need multiple options from this list or additional solutions not mentioned here.
The top DevOps testing tools include:
BrowserStack is a cloud-based app and browser testing platform. It lets you test your software using real devices and is more accurate than regular emulators and simulators. Tests can be fully automated to collect results from multiple platforms and detect regressions compared to previous releases.
BrowserStack is a commercial solution with a free trial. Its comprehensive documentation helps you integrate tests into your apps and release pipelines.
Key features
- Live cross-browser testing on real devices
- Automated visual reviews
- Provides insights into test performance
- Compatible with both web and native apps
Pricing: A variety of pricing plans starting at $29/month; free trial available
Website: https://www.browserstack.com
Pros & cons
✅ Provides real device testing across a wide range of browsers and devices.
❌ Cost may become high with increased usage.
Jenkins is a leading automation server and one of the oldest tools for implementing CI/CD pipelines. It is highly flexible and customizable, providing a robust platform for executing tests and accessing results within your DevOps workflows. You can use it to integrate all your other tools and reliably distribute testing jobs across physical machines.
Key features
- Fully open-source
- Extensible using plugins
- Distributed architecture enables reliable performance
- Provides an automation layer for integrating other tools and processes
License/pricing: Open-source
Website: https://www.jenkins.io
Use case example: How to manage Terraform workflows using Jenkins
Pros & cons
✅ Highly customizable with extensive plugin support for automation
❌ Setup and maintenance can be complex for large pipelines
Opkey is a no-code testing platform designed to fully automate your end-to-end and integration testing processes. It incorporates AI functionality that can find test coverage gaps, detect tests likely to be affected by new changes, and offer automated resolutions to fix broken tests.
Opkey is primarily aimed at enterprises with project inventories that span multiple technologies. It can be used with apps created in systems such as Oracle EBS, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and SAP.
Key features
- Create new tests without writing code
- Automatically flags test problems and self-heals
- Includes pre-built test scripts for popular technologies
- Offers dashboards, reports, and audit trails to track test activity
Pricing: Customized quotes; free trial available
Website: https://www.opkey.com
Pros & cons
✅ No-code automation platform, reducing technical complexity
❌ Limited flexibility for advanced users
Postman is a highly popular developer tool used to build and test API endpoints. Primarily a web-based interface that lets you conveniently call APIs and inspect their responses, Postman includes built-in test creation capabilities that run in an embedded JavaScript environment.
You can use Postman to check that your APIs are returning the expected results, preventing regressions from reaching production.
Key features
- Build and test APIs in one application
- Supports all popular API types, including REST, GraphQL, and gRPC
- Tests can be shared among team members
- Simple JavaScript-based testing API
Pricing: Basic, Professional, and Enterprise plans starting at $14 per user per month; Free plan available
Website: https://www.postman.com
Pros & cons
✅ Excellent API testing and debugging features with an intuitive interface
❌ Limited to API testing, lacking broader test case management features
Puppet is a configuration management tool used to maintain infrastructure in a consistent state. It supports compliance initiatives by preventing your resources from drifting away from their expected configuration.
For the purpose of code tests, Puppet can be used to ensure your tests run in a consistent environment each time they’re executed. It can provision your test environments, check they meet required compliance standards, and prevent unauthorized changes being applied, helping minimize the risk of discrepancies occurring between test repeats.
Key features
- Defines infrastructure configurations in declarative manifest files
- Compatible with all major compute environments, including cloud and physical deployments
- Large community of developers
- Open-source version available
License/pricing: Open-source + Commercial version Puppet Enterprise
Website: https://www.puppet.com
Pros & cons
✅ Simplifies configuration management and infrastructure automation
❌ The learning curve can be steep for beginners.
Cypress is a test framework for web applications. It accelerates the process of creating tests, debugging them, and inspecting changes by offering a visual experience that runs inside your browser — right alongside the app that’s being tested. Tests are deterministic, so you’ll get the same results each time they’re run.
One of Cypress’s main benefits is its simplicity. It’s easy to install and requires no additional server or agent components. An optional commercial SaaS solution allows you to scale up cloud tests and centrally analyze failures.
Key features
- Simple visual and end-to-end tests for web apps
- Deterministic test scripts
- Easy to integrate with CI pipeline providers
- Offers insights into test results and performance
Pricing: Team, Business, and Enterprise plans starting at $67 per month; Free trial available
Website: https://www.cypress.io
Pros & cons
✅ Fast and reliable end-to-end testing with built-in time travel debugging
❌ Limited support for cross-browser testing compared to other tools
Parasoft is a platform that automates end-to-end and security tests for APIs, web apps, and other cloud services. It includes a robust set of features for executing code tests, conducting static analysis, and proving that compliance standards are being adhered to.
This commercial solution with an emphasis on C++, C#, and .NET is ideal for teams looking for a comprehensive testing solution suitable for safety-critical regulated environments.
Key features
- Includes multiple testing functions within one platform
- Supports embedded environments, including industry, automotive, and medical
- Monitors compliance with industrial safety and security standards
- Integrates with popular source control and CI/CD platforms, including GitHub, Jenkins, and Jira
Pricing: Pricing available on request; Free demo and trial available
Website: https://www.parasoft.com
Pros & cons
✅ Comprehensive suite of tools for automated testing, including API and UI
❌ Expensive for smaller teams or individual users
Lambdatest is a cross-platform cloud testing service offering automated testing on a fleet of real devices. The platform also supports Selenium scripts, Playwright testing, and AI-powered visual regression checks. You can build, run, and validate the results of your app’s test suite without having to manually set up any infrastructure.
Lambdatest offers a lifetime free plan that smaller teams and solo devs can use to run a limited number of tests each month.
Key features
- Live web app testing across thousands of browser versions
- Tests native apps using real devices
- Automated screenshot-based visual regression tests
- Provides detailed test performance reports with AI analysis
Pricing: Live, Real Device, and Enterprise plans starting at $15 per month; Free plan available
Website: https://www.lambdatest.com
Pros & cons
✅ Provides scalable cloud-based cross-browser testing on various environments
❌ Performance can degrade with larger test executions.
Apache JMeter is a well-established load-balancing tool used to test the performance and stability of web services. The JMeter toolkit allows you to simulate heavy loads, letting you check your workloads remain resilient even in times of high demand. It’s capable of performing distributed testing, where multiple worker machines all direct traffic towards your target server.
Key features
- Conduct distributed load testing of web services
- Supports HTTP/S, REST, SOAP, FTP, TCP, and more
- Can be used as a CLI or graphical IDE
- Open-source and supported by the Apache Software Foundation
License: Open-source
Website: https://jmeter.apache.org
Pros & cons
✅ Excellent for performance and load testing with open-source flexibility
❌ UI can be challenging, and it requires technical expertise to set up tests.
Testsigma is a test automation platform that emphasizes “plain English” test generation. Instead of learning a scripting language, you can write tests using simple declarative sentences, such as “click on search. ” This makes test logic more accessible to product managers, designers, and executives who may be unfamiliar with regular testing methods.
Testsigma is designed to facilitate simple integration with CI/CD providers including Jenkins, Travis CI, Circle CI, and Azure DevOps. Tests can be run continually as code changes, with results displayed in chat platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams so developers stay informed of failures.
Key features
- Creates tests using plain English written statements
- Supports generative AI test creation
- Multiple integrations with other DevOps platforms
- Suitable for web, mobile, API, and cloud service testing
Pricing: Pro and Enterprise plans with pricing available upon request; Free trial available
Website: https://testsigma.com
Pros & cons
✅ Codeless automation with support for mobile, web, and API testing
❌ Less adaptable for complex testing scenarios
Selenium is a browser automation toolkit for continuous testing. It’s suitable for a broad variety of use cases but is most commonly found powering test workloads.
Selenium allows you to write simple test scripts that apply actions within a target browser instance. It performs actions in the same way as a real user would, making them accurate representations of your app’s performance. Selenium also provides an IDE for conveniently recording and replaying your own browser interactions.
Key features
- Automates web browser interactions to test app functions
- Conveniently records and plays back activity to debug problems
- Scales tests across multiple machines and browser/OS combinations
- Supported by cloud testing platforms
Pricing: Open-source
Website: https://www.selenium.dev
Pros & cons
✅ Powerful open-source tool for cross-browser testing automation
❌ Requires significant coding knowledge and lacks built-in reporting features
K6 is a developer-oriented load testing tool developed by Grafana. It’s used to simulate periods of high demand, enabling you to improve app resiliency before failures occur in production. Tests are scripted in JavaScript and are compatible with REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and WebSocket APIs.
Beyond load testing, K6 can also inject faults into Kubernetes apps to test what happens when app errors occur. This lets you preempt more problems that would otherwise have gone unnoticed until experienced by a user.
Key features
- Conducts load tests including stress tests and spike tests
- Collects test performance metrics from real browsers
- Performs fault injection testing for Kubernetes deployments
- Open-source version available
Pricing: Pro and Advanced plans starting at $19 per month; $0.15 per virtual user hour; Free plan available
Website: https://k6.io
Pros & cons
✅ Efficient performance testing tool with scripting based on JavaScript
❌ Limited protocol support compared to other load testing tools
Appium is an open-source project focused on automating UI tests. It’s compatible with all major app platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and various popular TV operating systems.
Tests can be written in multiple programming languages, including JavaScript, Java, Python, Ruby and .NET, enabling you to often write tests in the same language as your app’s code.
Appium runs locally on your machine as a single server process. The server executes the tests you write in your chosen client programming language, handling the interactions with your connected test hardware or simulator instance.
Key features
- Tests can be written for multiple platforms with several programming language options.
- Runs locally on your machine
- Fully open-source
- Supports plugins and extension drivers to add more features and platform integrations
Pricing: Open-source
Website: http://appium.io
Pros & cons
✅ Supports mobile app testing across Android and iOS platforms
❌ Performance can be slower due to reliance on WebDriver-based architecture
Used throughout the DevOps lifecycle, Docker is the leading containerization platform frequently. Packaging apps into containers that include your code’s runtime, dependencies, and tests lets you ensure a consistent environment is used each time tests complete.
Docker can also make it easier for devs and QA teams to publish and execute test suites, whether on their own machine or as part of a CI pipeline.
Key features
- Package test environments as reusable containers
- Helps eliminate discrepancies between environments
- Popular developer tool
- Ideal for CI pipelines
Pricing: Pro, Team, and Business tiers starting at $9 per month; Free Personal plan
Website: https://www.docker.com
Use case example: How to Create a CI/CD Pipeline with Docker
Pros & cons
✅ Simplifies environment management by using containerization
❌ Containers can introduce complexity in networking and debugging.
QA Wolf is a cloud platform that utilizes AI to automate test coverage for web and mobile apps. It claims to let you achieve 80% coverage within four months while offering a “zero flake” guarantee, ensuring all tests run reliably. QA Wolf also executes tests on fully parallelized infrastructure, so developers receive results with minimum delay.
Key features
- Automatically generates test coverage
- Emphasizes test quality by preventing flakes
- Parallel execution environment
- Aimed at larger teams and organizations
Pricing: Pay-per-test model
Website: https://www.qawolf.com
Pros & cons
✅ Fast and easy-to-use testing tool with integrated team collaboration features
❌ Limited capabilities for complex automation tasks
Predator is an open-source API performance testing platform that’s used to conduct distributed load tests of cloud applications and databases. It’s simple to operate in a Kubernetes cluster or as a stand-alone Docker container.
Predator is controlled using either a powerful web interface or a REST API that enables programmatic integration with scripts and CI pipelines. Load-testing jobs can also be scheduled to run automatically, letting you monitor performance insights on a regularly recurring basis.
Key features
- Cloud-native distributed load testing platform
- Real-time reports and built-in monitoring dashboard
- Supports scheduled jobs and API integration
- Open-source platform deployed as a container
Pricing: Open-source
Website: https://zooz.github.io/predator
Pros & cons
✅ Open-source load testing tool built for modern microservices architectures
❌ Limited community support and documentation, as it is relatively new
Functionize is an enterprise-oriented testing platform. Like some of the other entries on this list, Functionize emphasizes generative AI capabilities that allow you to obtain maximum coverage while shortening your testing cycles. New test cases can be created without writing any code, with support available for Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Workday, and other popular app platforms.
Key features
- Test generation for enterprise app platforms
- Integrates with key DevOps tools including GitHub, Heroku, and Jenkins
- Supports functional, visual, and end-to-end testing
- Includes AI-powered automation capabilities
Pricing: Customized quotes; free trial available
Website: https://www.functionize.com
Pros & cons
✅ AI-powered testing platform offering intelligent automation
❌ Higher costs, and AI reliance can reduce flexibility in test control
Katalon is an all-in-one test automation solution that allows you to create tests using various methods, including no-code, low-code, and fully scripted options. You can run your tests locally, choose a Katalon cloud instance, or connect to your existing CI service such as GitLab CI, Jenkins, or Azure DevOps.
Tests can target browsers, mobile apps, desktop platforms, and APIs, and enterprise-specific features include AI-driven test analytics and automated optimization options. Katalon can also scale your test suite with load balancing and parallel execution.
Key features
- Works with APIs and web, mobile, and desktop apps
- Tests run locally, in the cloud, or in CI
- Parallel execution and automatic load balancing
- Free tier available for individuals and smaller teams
Pricing: Premium and Ultimate plans starting at $175 per user per month; Free plan available
Website: https://katalon.com
Pros & cons
✅ Comprehensive tool that supports web, mobile, and API testing with a codeless option
❌ May experience slower performance with larger test suites
Vagrant is a popular IaC tool for creating virtualized developer environments on demand. It’s a lightweight system for provisioning new infrastructure resources from declarative config files that guarantee stable repeatability.
Testing is one of the many scenarios where Vagrant can be useful. You can easily bring up consistent test environments containing the packages and configurations you require, making it easier to mirror real infrastructure. This also reduces the risk of flaky tests caused by environment discrepancies that occur between runs.
Key features
- Works with declarative IaC config files
- Focus on lightweight, portable environments ideal for testing
- Can be used to manage your own test infrastructure
- Enables unification of different workflows
Pricing: Personal and Organization plans starting at $5 per month per private box, with a free tier available.
Website: https://www.vagrantup.com
Pros & cons
✅ Simplifies environment setup by creating reproducible development environments
❌ Requires substantial resources when running multiple environments concurrently
Terratest is a Go library that facilitates automated tests for your infrastructure code. It supports popular IaC, cloud, and container tools including Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, and OPA.
Tests are written in Go and can execute the IaC tools you use, allowing you to deploy real infrastructure resources to check your configs work as you expect. Terratest provides convenient built-in patterns and APIs you can use to validate the state of your environments.
Key features
- Powerful tests written in Go
- Works with real IaC tools in real environments
- Includes post-test clean-up capabilities
- Supports local testing for faster iteration
License: Open-source
Website: https://terratest.gruntwork.io
Use case example: What is Terratest and how to use it?
Pros & cons
✅ Provides infrastructure-as-code testing with Go, ideal for cloud infrastructure
❌ Requires knowledge of Go programming language, which adds learning overhead
Spacelift is not exactly a DevOps testing tool, but it allows you to connect to and orchestrate all of your infrastructure tooling, including infrastructure as code, version control systems, observability tools, control and governance solutions, and cloud providers.
With Spacelift, you can provision, configure, and govern with one or more automated workflows that orchestrate Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible, and Kubernetes.
Spacelift was built with DevOps/platform engineers in mind, but it evolved into the go-to platform for software engineers because they can increase their velocity with self-service infrastructure that implements all their organization’s guardrails. It greatly enhances collaboration among engineers, offering them a central location to make infrastructure-related decisions.
Key features
- Flexibility: Bring your own image, control what happens before and after every runner phase, and integrate with any third-party tool you want.
- VCS integration: Integrates with popular VCS providers such as GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, and Azure DevOps.
- Policies at multiple decision levels: You can control how many approvals you need for a run, what resources can be created, what parameters those resources can have, what happens when a pull request is open, and where to send your notifications data.
- Cloud integrations: Dynamic temporary credentials for AWS, Azure, and GCP.
- Drift detection and remediation: Ensures reliability of your infrastructure by detecting and remediating drift.
- Contexts: Reusable Environment variables and Mounted files.
- Self-service infrastructure with Blueprints: You can define infrastructure templates that can be easily deployed. These templates can have policies/integrations/contexts/drift detection embedded inside them for reliable deployment.
- Stack dependencies: Create dependencies between stacks and pass outputs from one to another. This can help to build an environment promotion pipeline easily.
- Visibility: Easily see all the deployed resources and details about them.
- Self-hosted capability: Spacelift can be self-hosted in AWS and AWS Gov Cloud.
See why DevOps Engineers recommend Spacelift.
Pricing: Free tier for individual and small teams. Starter, Business, and Enterprise tiers starting at $399 per month.
Website: https://spacelift.io/
Use case example: How to improve your infrastructure orchestration with Spacelift
Testing is an integral part of DevOps that ensures your software products continually meet required quality standards. Using automated testing tools like those we’ve featured in this article highlights bugs and delivers timely feedback to developers as they work.
Including tests in your CI/CD pipelines also supports your compliance posture by preventing you from shipping broken changes that could pose security risks or lead to a data breach.
The landscape of DevOps testing tools is vibrant and diverse, with a great selection of exciting tools to choose from. We’ve only skimmed the surface with this list, so don’t worry if you’ve not found the right option just yet. Check out our guides to the 73 most useful DevOps tools or 16 DevOps best practices to get more inspiration for improving your workflows.
Solve your infrastructure challenges
Spacelift is a flexible orchestration solution for IaC development. It delivers enhanced collaboration, automation, and controls to simplify and accelerate the provisioning of cloud-based infrastructures.
