Announcing the Top Rated Functional Testing Tools for 2018

Today, we awarded the 2018 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Functional Testing Tools. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are unique in that they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user satisfaction scores.

Here are the winners in each segment, listed in order of research frequency on TrustRadius. We have also provided insights on how to pick the right functional testing software based on your needs and current industry trends.

Overall Top Rated

• Selenium
• TestComplete
• Sauce Labs

Top Rated by Enterprises

• Selenium
• TestComplete
• Sauce Labs

Top Rated by Mid-Sized Companies

• Selenium
• HP UFT
• TestComplete

Top Rated by Small Businesses

• BrowserStack

What are functional testing tools?

In agile and DevOps environments, automated testing is an integral part of the product development process where the software is tested automatically to make sure that it conforms to the requirements. Test processes run continuously and are fully integrated with development and delivery. Unit, functional and nonfunctional testing are run automatically and are orchestrated by continuous integration and delivery tools.

Functional testing is one flavor of testing, but is perhaps the most costly and time-consuming step in continuous testing. Functional testing is often referred to as “black box testing” as this kind of testing software typically tests every piece of system functionality by providing appropriate input, verifying the output, and comparing the actual results with the expected results. Functional testing is also concerned with testing usability to make sure that the navigation system performs as designed.

Functional testing is distinguished from non-functional testing, which is testing of how well the software behaves in terms of performance, scalability etc. rather than the functional requirements of a system or sub-system.

Types of functional testing tools

The functional testing tool category includes cross-browser and UI testing tools which are designed to test web applications directly within a range of different browsers. Many of these tools are open-source tools (e.g. Selenium for cross-browser testing, and Appium for mobile testing), which have become ubiquitous. Their pervasiveness is such that commercial tools are sometimes built on top of these well-known testing platforms. The category also includes some older enterprise tool suites which tend to be very fully featured, but correspondingly complex and expensive. More modern lightweight tools tend to be more intuitive to use for non-programmers.

Choosing the right functional testing tool

Given the variety of tools available, it can be difficult to know how to choose. One place to start is to understand where most of the major bugs appear. If they tend to be in the GUI, a GUI test automation tool is likely to be more appropriate than a complete test suite. Similarly, it is helpful to understand who is using the tool. If it is primarily for programmers, a more technical product may be appropriate, while non-technical users will need a more intuitive product that can be easily learned.

Reviews on TrustRadius can be a helpful source of usability data for multiple products in the category. Reviews can also help in understanding other product attributes such as setup overhead, and quality of integration to continuous integration tools or other automated testing frameworks.

Top Rated Criteria

Products included in the 2018 Top Rated Functional Testing Tools list must have been in the top tier of their category TrustMap on April 27, 2018, to earn a Top Rated badge. To qualify for the Functional Testing Tools TrustMap, products must have 10 reviews and ratings on TrustRadius. Every reviewer is verified and every review is vetted before publication. Products are plotted on the map based on end-user data, including users’ likelihood to recommend scores as well as buyer research patterns. To learn more about TrustMaps and Top Rated methodology, check out this page.