Eight tools tied for the most mentions in our test automation software measurement, each named in just 2 of the 6 buyer questions we ran on ChatGPT and Gemini on 2026-08-07: ACCELQ, BrowserStack, BugBug, Cypress, Katalon True Platform, mabl, Playwright and Selenium. No product did better than 2 of 6.
Across the six questions, ChatGPT and Gemini named 33 different products a combined 41 times. 25 of those 33 were named only once, or in 1 of 6 answers (17%). The headline for a marketer is that this category has no consensus pick: a single mention is by far the most common outcome, and the top of the list tops out at a 33% hit rate.
We ran six phrasings of the same buying question, each as one live web search per assistant: "best test automation software," "best test automation software for small teams," "what test automation software should I use," "best free test automation software," "most affordable test automation software," and "test automation software recommendations." Because the leading eight tools all sit at 2 of 6, there is no default answer here, and the shortlist a buyer sees swings hard on which of the six phrasings they type.
How the shortlist changed from "best" to "free" to "affordable"
The bare "best test automation software" question returned an enterprise-leaning set of 5: mabl, Katalon True Platform, Perfecto by Perforce, Keysight Eggplant and TestRail. Three of those, Perfecto by Perforce, Keysight Eggplant and TestRail, appeared in this question and in none of the other five.
"best free test automation software" returned a completely different world: 8 open-source frameworks, namely Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, Puppeteer, WebdriverIO, TestCafe, Taiko and Gauge. Five of them, Puppeteer, WebdriverIO, TestCafe, Taiko and Gauge, appeared only in the free question. The single word "free" flipped the answer from commercial platforms to developer libraries.
"most affordable test automation software" returned yet another set of 6, and it barely resembled the free list: EZ Testing, BugBug, Xping, TestPlan, Gondola and TestFiesta. Five of these, EZ Testing, Xping, TestPlan, Gondola and TestFiesta, appeared only in the affordable question.
The most important number in the whole measurement: the "best free" set and the "most affordable" set share zero products. Free returned open-source tools, affordable returned small paid vendors, and not one tool landed on both lists. If you treat "free" and "affordable" as the same buyer, the assistants disagree, they answer them as two separate questions.
"what test automation software should I use" acted as the hub, with 8 names: Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, mabl, Testim, ACCELQ, Tricentis Tosca and BrowserStack. It borrowed mabl from the "best" set, Playwright, Selenium and Cypress from the "free" set, and ACCELQ and BrowserStack from the "recommendations" set. Only Testim and Tricentis Tosca appeared here and nowhere else.
"test automation software recommendations" returned an API- and platform-leaning set of 8: BrowserStack, Postman, Salesforce Platform, ACCELQ, Apidog, QA Wolf, Qase and Testlio. Six of them, Postman, Salesforce Platform, Apidog, QA Wolf, Qase and Testlio, appeared only in this question. Only ACCELQ and BrowserStack carried over, both shared with the "what should I use" answer.
"best test automation software for small teams" returned 6: Endtest, BugBug, TestAgent, Katalon True Platform, EirTests and TestWheel. Four of them, Endtest, TestAgent, EirTests and TestWheel, appeared only here, while Katalon carried over from "best" and BugBug reappeared in "affordable."
Where the answers came from
The 41 product mentions rested on 45 citations across 37 domains. The two most-cited domains were bugbug.io and pie.inc at 3 citations each, followed by contextqa.com, github.com, katalon.com and tinyctl.dev at 2 each. Every other domain was cited once.
Independent roundup blogs did a lot of the work. pie.inc fed three separate answers (small teams, what should I use, and recommendations), while contextqa.com and tinyctl.dev each fed two. Because "what should I use" and "recommendations" drew on the same three roundups (contextqa.com, pie.inc and tinyctl.dev), the same two products, ACCELQ and BrowserStack, are the ones bridging those answers. Shared sources produce shared names.
Here is the key insight for a vendor: in this category the assistants cite vendors' own websites, and those vendors get named. 18 of the 33 named products had their own domain appear as a source, including BugBug via bugbug.io (3 citations), Katalon True Platform via katalon.com (2), ACCELQ via accelq.com, mabl via mabl.com, TestRail via testrail.com, Perfecto by Perforce via perfecto.io and Keysight Eggplant via keysight.com, down to small names like Xping (xping.io), Gondola (gondolatest.com), TestPlan (test-plan.io), TestFiesta (testfiesta.com) and EZ Testing (ez-testing.com). Your own site is not too promotional to be cited here, it was the most common source type in the whole set.
Open-source tools got in through GitHub: github.com was cited twice, feeding the "best" and "best free" answers, which is how Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, Puppeteer, WebdriverIO and TestCafe reach the shortlist. If your project lives on GitHub, that README is a page the assistants are reading.
The big review directories were nearly absent. G2 was cited once (learn.g2.com) and Gartner once (gartner.com, in the bare "best" question only). Capterra did not appear at all, and neither did any Reddit or Quora thread. Stack Overflow showed up only as its company blog (stackoverflow.blog), once. In a category people assume is ruled by review grids, G2 was cited exactly 1 time out of 45.
What a vendor here would do to get named
Getting named is a sourcing problem, not a market-share problem. 5 of the 6 products in the "most affordable" answer, EZ Testing, Xping, TestPlan, Gondola and TestFiesta, are small vendors that got named because their own domain was the cited source. No brand recognition put them there, a page the assistant retrieved did.
So the play is concrete: be present in the exact sources these answers used. Publish the pricing and comparison pages on your own domain, the source behind 18 of the 33 named products. Earn a place on the independent roundups the assistants lean on, led by pie.inc (3 answers), contextqa.com and tinyctl.dev (2 each). Keep your open-source repo current on GitHub. Chasing a G2 badge barely moves these particular answers, where G2 was cited once in 45.
Pick your phrasing battles too. Because "free" and "affordable" returned zero shared products, a free tool that wants the "affordable" list, or a cheap paid tool that wants the "free" list, is fighting for a shortlist it is not on today. The 2-of-6 ceiling cuts the other way as well: no competitor has locked this category down, so the room at the top is real.
The full list, counted
We kept each product name exactly as the assistants returned it, so "Katalon True Platform" is listed as named rather than shortened. Below these eight, 25 more products were each named once, or 1 of 6 (17%).
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| ACCELQ | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| BrowserStack | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| BugBug | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Cypress | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Katalon True Platform | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| mabl | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Playwright | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Selenium | 2 of 6 | 33% |
Where Glotier fits
Glotier does not sell test automation software, so we are correctly absent from all 6 of these answers. We would not fake our way onto a list we do not belong on, and the data shows we did not.
This measurement is, though, exactly what we run for the category you do sell. We put the six buyer questions to the assistants, record every product named and every source behind them, and show why the named products are named. On 2026-08-07 that was 33 products, 41 mentions and 37 source domains for test automation software, and for you it would be your product and your sources in those slots. The check is free, no account, and takes about a minute.