Crowdtesting leverages an online community of real users to test products under real-world conditions. This approach can uncover bugs and UX issues that in-house teams might miss, and it provides diverse feedback quickly.
Many platforms offer crowdtesting services; below we explore some of the best tools and their key features.
BetaTesting.com
Large, diverse and verified participant community: BetaTesting gives you access to recruit beta testers from a massive global pool of 450,000 participants. All testers are real people (non-anonymous, ID-verified and vetted), spanning many demographics, professions, and devices. This ensures your beta product is tried by users who closely match your target audience, yielding authentic feedback.
Variety of test types & feedback types (e.g. user research, longitudinal testing, bug/QA testing): The platform manages structured test cycles with multiple feedback channels. The feedback collected through BetaTesting is multifaceted, including surveys, usability videos, bug reporting, and messaging. This variety allows companies to gain a holistic understanding of user experiences and identify specific areas that require attention. In practice, testers log bugs (with screenshots or recordings), fill out usability surveys, and answer questions, all consolidated into actionable reports.
Enterprise beta programs: BetaTesting offers a white-labeled solution to allow companies to seamlessly manage their beta community. This includes targeting/retargeting the right users for ongoing testing, collecting feedback in a variety of ways, and automating the entire process (e.g. recruiting, test management, bug reports, incentives, etc). The platform can be customized, including branding, subdomain, landing page, custom profile fields, and more.
Quality controls and vetted insights: BetaTesting emphasizes tester quality and trustworthy insights. Testers are ID-verified and often pre-screened for your criteria. This screening, combined with the platform’s automated and manual quality reviews ensures the issues and feedback you receive are high-value and reliable. Companies can be confident that BetaTesting’s community feedback will be from genuine, engaged users, not random drive-by testers or worse (e.g. bots or AI).
TestIO
On-demand testing 24/7: Test IO delivers fast, on-demand functional testing with a global crowd of testers available around the clock. This means you can launch a test cycle at any time and get results in as little as a few hours, useful for tight development sprints or late-night releases.
Seamless dev tool integration: The platform integrates directly with popular development and bug-tracking tools, so teams can triage and resolve issues quickly. Developers see crowdfound bugs appear in their workflow automatically, reducing the friction between finding a bug and fixing it.
Supports exploratory and scripted testing: Test IO enables both structured test case execution and open exploratory testing in real-world environments. At the same time, you can provide formal test cases if needed. This flexibility means you can use Test IO for exploratory bug hunts as well as to validate specific user journeys or regression checklists.
Applause
“Professional” testers: Applause (and its tester community, uTest) is known for it’s large diverse crowd of testers that are focused primarily on “functional testing”, i.e. manual QA testing for defined test scripts. Rather than touting a community of “real-world people” like some platforms, their community is focused on “professional” testers that might specialize in usability, accessibility, payments, and more.
Managed Testing (Professional Services): Applause provides a test team to help manage testing and work directly with your team. This includes services like bug triage and writing test cases on behalf of your team. If your team has limited capacity and is looking to pay for professional services to run your test program, Applause may be a good fit. Note that this often times using Managed/Professional Services requires a budget that is 2-3X that in comparison to platforms that can be used in a self-service capacity.
Real device testing across global markets: Applause offers real-device testing on a large range of devices, operating systems, and locales. You can test on any many different device/OS combinations that your customers use. They tout full device/OS coverage, testing in any setting / any country, and diversity based on location, devices, and other data.
Check this article out: AI vs. User Researcher: How to Add More Value than a Robot
Testbirds
Device diversity and IoT expertise: Testbirds is a crowdtesting company that specializes in broad device coverage and IoT (Internet of Things) testing. Founded in 2011 in Germany, it has built a large tester community (600k+ testers in 193 countries) and even requires crowd testers to pass an entrance exam for quality. In short, if you need your smart home gadget or automotive app tested by real users on diverse hardware, Testbirds excels at that deep real-world coverage.
Comprehensive feedback methods: Beyond functional testing, Testbirds offers robust usability and UX feedback services. They can conduct remote usability studies, surveys, and other user research through their crowd. In fact, their service lineup includes unique offerings like “crowd surveys” for gathering user opinions at scale, and remote UX testing where real users perform predefined tasks and give qualitative feedback. For example, Testbirds can recruit target users to perform scenario-based usability tests (following a script of tasks) and record their screen and reactions. This mix of survey data, task observations, and open-ended feedback provides a 360° view of user experience issues.
Crowd-based performance and load testing: Uniquely, Testbirds can leverage its crowd for performance and load testing of your product. Instead of only using automated scripts, they involve real users or devices to generate traffic and find bottlenecks. By using the crowd in this way, Testbirds evaluates your product’s stability and scalability (e.g. does an app server crash when 500 people actually use the app simultaneously?). It’s an effective way to ensure your software can handle the stress of real user load.
Not sure what incentives to give, check out this article: Giving Incentives for Beta Testing & User Research
UserTesting
Rapid video-based user studies: UserTesting is a pioneer in remote usability studies, enabling rapid creation of task-based tests and getting video feedback from real users within hours. With UserTesting, teams create a test with a series of tasks or questions, and the platform matches it with participants from its large panel who fit your target demographics. You then receive videos of each participant thinking out loud as they attempt the tasks, providing a window into authentic user behavior and reactions almost in real time.
Targeted audience selection: A major strength of UserTesting is its robust demographic targeting. You can specify the exact profile of testers you need, by age, gender, country, interests, tech expertise, etc. For example, if you’re building a fintech app for U.S. millennials, you can get exactly that kind of user. This way, the qualitative insights you gather are relevant to your actual customer base.
Qualitative UX insights for decision-making: UserTesting delivers rich qualitative data, users’ spoken thoughts, facial expressions (if enabled), and written survey responses, which help teams empathize with users and improve UX. Seeing and hearing real users struggle or succeed with your product can uncover why issues occur, not just what. These human insights complement analytics by explaining user behavior. Product managers and designers use this input to validate assumptions, compare design iterations, and ultimately make user-centered decisions. In sum, UserTesting provides a stream of customer experience videos that can illuminate pain points and opportunities, leading to better design and higher customer satisfaction.
Now check out the Top 5 Beta Testing Companies Online
Final Thoughts
Choosing the right crowd testing tool depends on your team’s specific goals, whether it’s hunting bugs or many devices, getting usability feedback via video, or scaling QA quickly. All of these crowdtesting platform enable you to to test with real people in real-world scenarios without the overhead of gaining an in-house lab.
By leveraging the crowd, product teams can catch issues earlier, ensure compatibility across diverse environments, and truly understand how users experience their product.
Have questions? Book a call in our call calendar.
BetaTesting Blog 