When you run a beta test for your product, there are tradeoffs to consider between professional testers and real-world beta testers. A lot of companies use professional beta testers to help companies test their products, and those testers have deep experience dealing with technical tests that require a deeper dive into a product to find issues.
Before we changed our name to BetaTesting, we built Erlibird as a community of early adopters interested in finding new tech products and providing feedback for them. It made our community a diverse mix of tech-savvy early adopters and regular people. Since then, we have focused on building a community of real-world testers across the world with a variety of tech experience.
We believe using real-world testers leads to better feedback and results for most tests. We are able to recruit testers that actually match the audience for your product, with a true mix of platforms, operating systems, connection speeds, and more that help customers find real bugs and get more accurate UX and UI feedback.
In most cases, companies need quick feedback to iterate their products, see usability videos to learn where users might be getting confused, and test the validity of their new features and products. In those instances, a real-world community makes more sense than a community of professional testers.
BetaTesting Blog 