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Rainforest

The best Testlio alternatives in 2025

When you want to expand your QA testing capabilities or resources, Testlio can recruit QA specialists from their large “crowd” of QA personnel. Testlio also provides a platform to manage your tests, test runs, and results. If you’re considering a platform-enabled QA service like Testlio, there are a handful of other noteworthy providers you should know. We’ll cover them in this piece.

New research: AI struggles with open-source test maintenance challenges

Our new research shows AI adoption is high across software testing workflows. But AI isn’t (yet) paying off in ways that matter to software teams using open-source testing frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright. Open-source teams using AI are still spending just as much — if not more — time on painful test writing and maintenance tasks than ones not using AI. Contents Toggle.

When to run end-to-end (E2E) tests, explained

We sometimes have customers tell us they want to run end-to-end tests as often as possible in their development processes — as often as every commit. When you really care about quality, this might seem like a reasonable idea. After all, doesn’t the principle of shift left tell us to test as early as possible in the software development lifecycle? To catch bugs and other issues when they’re the least-expensive to fix?

Think twice before you hire a QA engineer

When you’re ready to automate your manual tests, you might naturally think you need to hire someone with a technical skill set who specializes in automating end-to-end tests. That is, you might think you need to hire a QA engineer. It’s not an unreasonable assumption. But for many startups, it’s the wrong thing to do. QA engineers are quite expensive (in more ways than one), bottleneck release processes with their complex tooling, and can present other types of business risks.

Surprise, your data warehouse can RAG

If you’re one of the cool kids building AI-based products you’ve probably heard of — or are already doing — RAG. If you’re not, let me tell you what RAG is before telling you one weird fact about it. “Retrieval-Augmented Generation” is nothing more than a fancy way of saying “including helpful information in your LLM prompt.” Still, there are many ways to do it and many questions to answer when building a RAG pipeline.

Watch: Using generative AI for test automation in Rainforest [Video]

We’ve integrated generative AI features deeply into our no-code test automation platform, Rainforest QA. Each of these features is designed to help you avoid the time-consuming and otherwise annoying work of keeping automated test suites up to date — so your software development team can stay focused on shipping, fast. In this video, our CEO, Fred Stevens-Smith, walks through what some of these genAI features look like in action.

Rainforest QA vs. hiring a QA engineer

When you’re ready to make the transition from manual testing to test automation, it’s natural to consider hiring. A QA engineer — who has the technical skills to write and maintain automated tests in an open-source framework — can take the burden of end-to-end test management off of your development team, allowing them to ship more code, faster. But hiring a good QA engineer is — often prohibitively — expensive.