QA Reef vs Testsigma
The page where we are behind on our own headline: their core is Apache-2.0 and public today, and ours is not yet.
Facts about Testsigma were read from testsigma.com and their GitHub repository on 30 August 2026 and are described as their published material states them — check the current version before you buy. QA Reef is not affiliated with Testsigma; the name is used here only to identify the product being compared.
The short version
Testsigma in one line
Plain-English test authoring across web, mobile, API and Salesforce — with, unusually for this category, an Apache-2.0 core on GitHub you can self-host.
QA Reef in one line
An open-core QA agent you deploy like a Vercel project: record or describe a flow, get a deterministic Playwright spec, run it on your hardware or ours, and get PASS, FAIL, or UNMEASURED back.
This is the page where we are behind on our own headline. Testsigma’s core is Apache-2.0 and self-hostable today; ours is MIT but still being extracted into a public repo. If open source is your only criterion, they currently win it.
Side by side
| QA Reef | Testsigma | |
|---|---|---|
| Open source | Open core. The qareef CLI is Apache-2.0. The automation core under packages/core is MIT; extraction to a public repo is in progress. The generated tests are plain Playwright you already own. |
Yes. Their GitHub repository states Testsigma is available under the Apache License 2.0 and can be self-hosted via Docker or a downloadable package. The hosted cloud tiers are the commercial product. |
| Self-host | Yes. Node 22 + Playwright + a model key on your own machines, or hosted by us. Per-workspace data roots either way. | Yes, two ways. The Apache-2.0 repository self-hosts; separately, their Enterprise cloud tier lists public, private and on-prem deployment. |
| Pricing model | Not published — pre-launch. Self-hosted you pay only for your own model calls, each logged with its model id and cost. A local-model backend makes that $0. | Not published. Both listed tiers, Pro and Enterprise, show “Get Custom Pricing”. The open-source edition is free to run yourself. |
| Who writes the tests | You do — by recording in a hosted browser, or by giving the agent a goal. Deterministic codegen writes the Playwright spec; the model only proposes a title and assertions, stamped decided_by. |
You do, in plain English — their docs show steps like “Click on Login or Sign Up” — aimed at manual testers and QA analysts. |
| How flakiness is handled | A heal ladder: wait-and-retry → recorded alternates → DOM heuristic → model proposal → OCR → coordinates. Every heal must clear a same-control gate. Model heals are quarantined for human review, never auto-promoted. A coordinate click, or a run that healed more than 20% of its steps, returns UNMEASURED rather than a pass. | Their site describes a healer that adapts broken locators as the UI changes so coverage holds between releases. |
| Legacy / canvas UIs | Yes. The operator reads the screen with Apple Vision OCR or a vision model, so canvas and legacy UIs with no stable locators are still driveable. | Salesforce (Lightning, Classic, CPQ) and Windows desktop are named. Canvas is not. |
| CI integration | npx qareef CLI with real exit codes, a GitHub Action, and a Vercel Deployment Check that blocks a promote. |
Named: Jenkins, CircleCI, Azure DevOps, Bamboo, AWS, Travis CI, Codeship, plus Jira and the major device clouds. |
| Data ownership | Self-hosted: flows, screenshots, traces and the model-call ledger never leave your disk. Hosted: per-workspace data root, API tokens hashed at rest. | Your own infrastructure if you self-host the open-source edition; otherwise their cloud. |
Choose Testsigma if…
- You want an open-source test platform you can
docker runthis afternoon. Ours is not public yet. - Your authors are manual testers writing English, not engineers.
- You need web, mobile, API and Salesforce in one place.
- You want on-prem from a shipping product with an enterprise tier behind it.
Choose QA Reef if…
- You want the artifact to be a Playwright spec, not a platform test case.
- You want screen-reading operation for canvas and legacy UIs.
- You want
decided_byprovenance and a cost figure on every model call. - You want an UNMEASURED verdict and heals that wait for a human.
Where QA Reef falls short
On the open-source axis specifically, Testsigma is ahead of us today: their core is on GitHub under Apache-2.0 and ours is not public yet. We are not going to pretend otherwise on our own comparison page.
Sitewide caveats, on every page: QA Reef is pre-launch. No customers, no case studies, no published price, no SOC 2 report. Mobile (native app) testing is not supported. There is no managed human-QA service.
Questions
Is Testsigma really open source?
Their GitHub repository states the platform is available under the Apache License 2.0, with Docker and package self-hosting. That is a genuine OSI licence, unlike some "free" tiers in this category.
Then why pick QA Reef?
For what the core does rather than its licence: deterministic Playwright codegen you can review, OCR operation for UIs with no usable locators, quarantined heals, an UNMEASURED verdict, and per-call model provenance. If none of those matter to you, their open-source edition is a fine place to start.
What does Testsigma cost?
Not published. Both cloud tiers route to a custom quote. The open-source edition costs your own infrastructure.
When will QA Reef’s core be public?
Extraction is in progress and we have not committed to a date. Until the repository is up, treat our open-core claim as a stated intent backed by an Apache-2.0 CLI, not as something you can clone today.
Sources
Read 30 August 2026. Every statement about Testsigma above comes from one of these; nothing is inferred, estimated, or taken from a third-party comparison.
Comparing more than one?
Every rival we have written up, in one table — QA Wolf, the codeless platforms, the monitoring tools, the agencies, and rolling your own Playwright.
See the full comparison index →