18 Best Bug Tracking Tools in Software Testing 2023

With the ever-increasing demands for bug-free software, many businesses are merging the bug tracking tools with project management tools. According to Allied Market Research, the market of bug tracking tools in Software testing is predicted to grow by around 13.60% between 2016 and 2019. Now, you can expect an increase in cloud-based bug-tracking systems shortly. They offer seamless remote bug tracking, solving, reporting, and more.

What are bug tracking tools in software testing?

The bug tracking tools find, record, track, manage, report, communicate, and give suggestions to fix the bugs. They remove the need for Excel sheet records for the above tasks because they have modern mechanisms to handle these tasks easily. In this way, they save you time.

Importance of bug tracking tools in software testing

The bug tracking tools understand the density of defects, such as which area of your app occupies the higher number of bugs than others, the age of the defects, etc. They prevent duplicate bugs and invalid suggestions. Finally, you will get the standard and detailed-oriented defect reports from these tools. The reports notify you about any inadequate information, false positives, false negatives, outstanding defects, and more. Thus you need the bug tracking tools.

How useful are bug tracking tools for manual testing?

The bug tracking tools help manual testers to find and track the bugs efficiently. They help to identify the root causes and prioritize the defects based on time and other factors. Thus, the testing team becomes capable of gathering the test metrics and taking preventive measures for the bugs. Thus you need bug tracking tools for manual testing.

How to select the best bug tracking tool?

The best bug tracking tools come with the following features:

• A good reporting facility – You will get all the information about the bugs, severity, priority, etc. Also, you will get the graphs, and charts from the reports.
• Modern bug tracking mechanism – These tools provide logs, screenshots, and video recordings that help you to identify the bugs easily.
• Bug assigning – You can assign the bugs through an email. Then you will track the work history, comments, and progress from the tool.
• Storage – The best tool creates IDs and tickets to store and retrieve the bugs for future workflows.

18 Best Bug Tracking Tools for Software Testing in 2023

Here’s the list of Top 20 Bug Tracking Tools for Software Testing in 2023:

1. BrowserStack
2. Jira
3. Bugzilla
4. Monday.com
5. Kualitee
6. Zoho
7. Trac
8. Mantis
9. Redmine
10. Backlog
11. BugHerd
12. HP ALM/QC
13. eTraxis
14. BugFrog
15. BugNET
16. YouTrack
17. Axosoft
18. Marker.io

1. BrowserStack

BrowserStack provides cloud-based testing solutions for 3000+ real devices. It offers manual, automation, cross-browser, and parallel testing for users. It offers several debugging options – text logs, visual logs, video logs, network logs, etc. for tracking and resolving the bugs.

Features:

• The Live offers pre-installed developer tools for remote desktop browsers and mobile devices. The App Live provides real-time device logs for you.
• The Automate and App Automate provide screenshots, video recordings, and different types of logs for bug tracking and reporting.
• The Test Management offers flaky test detection, debugging, error tracking, and more.

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2. JIRA

JIRA is one of the popular bug tracking tools for manual testing. Atlassian is the owner of this tool. Several leading organizations in this world, such as NASA, Twitter, Audi, and more, are using this tool for bug tracking and reporting. It offers a free trial for new users.

Features:

• It supports agile workflow. The agile teams can use Scrum and Kanban templates for their testing.
• It can search, modify, and sort issues with a project issue navigator. Also, you can search the issues with the reporter, status, assignee, and type.
• The issue navigator helps you to get the overview of all the issues for your project with a table format.
• You can get insights about your team’s working through the JIRA roadmap.

3. Bugzilla

Bugzilla is a popular bug tracking tool with a web-based interface. This system helps to track the outstanding bugs, issues, problems, and more. Its defect-tracking capabilities are simple to use, and they are built from a source code management system like GitHub. It provides both free and priced licenses.

Features:

• It offers simple bug searches like Google for new users. The advanced search system lets you check the bugs by time and priority.
• It’s one of the common bug-reporting tools. It prepares the bug reports in different formats, like basic HTML, iCalendar, CSV, XML, long printable format, etc.
• You can schedule email notifications for receiving bug reports from Bugzilla.
• Moreover, it can identify duplicated bugs, modify bugs through emails, give a time estimation for bug fixing, and more.

4. Monday.com

This tool tracks the bugs with a simple drag-and-drop method. It has 180000+ customers globally.  Also, it comes with several collaboration tools for the teams. It offers free, basic, standard, pro, and enterprise plans.

Features:

• It builds custom road maps and charts for bug tracking, sprint planning, agile process, backlogs, automation workflows, project, and task management, etc.
• The Monday dashboards provide data visualization, tracking progress, running reports, and more.
• It has seamless integration with other tools like – Outlook, Teams, Google Calendar, Drive, etc.

5. Kualitee

Kualitee offers end-to-end ALM solutions, including defect tracking and management. The Kualitee’s defect management tool helps in bug capture, logs, defect management solutions, and more. It offers both manual and automated solutions.

Features:

• It offers rich, formatted, personalized, and flexible reporting.
• It has integrations with several third-party tools, including JIRA. These integrations help in creating customized tests, bug reporting, defect syncing, pipeline integrations, and more.
• Also, it offers reusable tests, personalized dashboards, and pre-defined roles and privileges.

6. Zoho

The Zoho bug tracker is a module of the Zoho Projects software. It has a customized interface, quick issue tracking, and fixing solutions. You will get several integrations of other tools like – GitHub, Bitbucket, Dropbox, etc. with this tool. It has both free and premium plans.

Features:

• You can record, submit, export, and fix the bugs with the custom workflows of the Zoho bug tracker. Also, you will get email notifications about any new bug arrival.
• It offers detailed bug reports with the number of bugs, fixed bugs, outstanding bugs, and more. Additionally, it sorts the reports according to the bug severity.
• It automates the bugs by setting automation rules, and emails, and connecting third-party apps for communication.

8. Trac

It’s a web-based, open-source tool, specialized for issue tracking and project management. It refers to your issues with the tickets and later you can use the tickets for defect management. It’s free to use.

Features:

• Trac uses wiki markup for creating issue descriptions, messages, and links. Also, this markup offers reference between bugs, changesets, tasks, etc.
• It has a timeline to show the project events and roadmaps for upcoming tasks.
• Trac has integration with the other version control systems, Wiki, and reporting tools.

9. Mantis

It’s an open-source tool for web-based issue tracking. It has a mobile version for Android and iPhones. It has cross-browser compatibility. 

So, it supports Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and more. You will get this tool both in free and commercial versions.

Features:

• The email notifications from Mantis, keep your teams and clients updated about the issues, bug fixing, resolutions, and comments.
• It provides role-based access control for the users.
• Also, you will get customized issue fields and workflows.

10.  Redmine

Redmine is an issue-tracking tool that provides solutions for bugs and defects. It has several integrations with source code management systems (ex. Git, CVS, etc). It is written in Ruby on Rails. It supports different platforms and databases. This is a free tool.

Features:

• It has a flexible issue-tracking system and supports issue creation through email. The issue tracker offers related issues, watchers, subtasks, filtering, sorting, and more.
• Also, it offers role-based access control, a Gantt chart, email notifications, calendars, time tracking, a custom field, and more.

11.  Backlog

This bug tracking tool offers software development with effective bug-capturing and tracking activities. Again you can get Kanban boards, burndown charts, access control, project management, etc from it.

Features:

• It offers push notifications, uploads attachments, pulls requests, updates, and more for the issues.
• You can integrate it with the backlog bug tracking tool by Jira, Slack, Jenkins, and more.
• With this tool you can easily break your tasks into checklists and subtasks.

12.  BugHerd

With BugHerd, you can easily manage, track, and store your bugs in a central place. It offers visual feedback for the bugs. It offers different plans for projects and guests. It quickly captures the technical information about bug fixing, browsers, screen resolution, etc.

Features:

• Captures screenshots or short videos to offer more précised solutions for the issues.
• Offers Kanban task boards, pinned feedback, and real-time comments.
• Provides integrations with Jira, Trello, Slack, GitHub, and more.

13.  HP ALM/ Quality Center QC

It offers application lifecycle management (ALM) to build, test, and deliver applications. It provides excellent solutions for defect management, reporting, and cross-project reports.

Features:

• Handles your projects’ quality and complexity with risk-based and requirement-based approaches. It efficiently manages test plans, automated workflows, results, and reusable tests.
• Offers test coverage analysis, traceability matrix, live analysis graphs, health reports, and more.

15.  eTraxis

It’s an open-source bug-tracking tool that provides customized solutions for your project and bug reporting. Also, it offers a help desk and CRM system. It has a pricing offer of 4 Euros/ month per 5 users.

Features:

• Operations, transition, and customizing data fields for the tracking items.
• Allows attaching files, own filters, email notifications, and comments for the items.

16.  BugFrog

It’s a visual defect reporting tool. BugFrog captures and shares annotated screenshots with the other tools. It offers integrations with Jira, Trello, Slack, monday, and more. This tool offers a 14-day free trial and then $19/month.

Features:

• Provides easily accusable visual feedback with the drawing notes and bug reporting with emails.
• Developers can efficiently find the bug locations through metadata.

17.  BugNET

BugNET is an open-source, free issue-tracking tool for the ASP.NET platform. It provides all the solutions for project management, also. It’s written on C#. The professional version requires a priced plan.

Features:

• Provides solutions for project issues using C# and ASP.NET. It uses Microsoft SQL DB to make the codebase simple and scalable.
• Also, it offers project vulnerabilities reports with the security confidence index and vulnerability exposure index.

18.  YouTrack

With the YouTrack, you will get agile-centric solutions, such as scrum boards, kanban boards, backlogs, custom workflows, and more. Also, it offers bug tracking, issue tracking, reporting, and time management. It supports mobile versions of Android and iPhones. It comes with both the free and commercial versions.

Features:

• Effortless team collaboration, automated tasks, helpdesks, planning, and time tracking.
• Offers 20 types of customizable reports to track, manage, and analyze the projects’ progress.
• Offers Gantt charts and dashboards for personalized solutions.

19.  Axosoft

You can use this software as an on-premise or a hosted software. It offers Card View, a Kanban board to visualize real-time statuses for your project. It has customers like Cisco, IBM, and more.

Features:

• The scrum and bug tracking system of this tool offers sprint planning, release, progress visualization, item cards, burndown charts, and drag and drop.
• The help desk Supports email tickets and responses for customers.
• It offers a legendary set of Git tools, named GitKraken.

20.  Marker.io

It’s a robust visual bug-reporting tool. With this tool, you can easily collaborate and annotate web pages and screenshots. It offers integration and 2-way sync with tools like BrowserStack, Trello, Jira, and more. It has a free trial and three types of commercial plans for the users.

Features:

• Provides automated records of the JavaScript errors to your issues.
• It adds console logs and environmental data automatically to your projects.
• Has the ability to export your annotations as PDFs/images/embedded to the web.

How to use a test management tool or product management tool for bug tracking?

The test management tools plan your tests, create the test cases, monitor test coverage, defect tracking, and reporting. That means they handle the entire Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC). The product management tools handle everything in the different SDLC stages of planning, developing, testing, and deployment.

But the bug tracking tools only identify, track, and report the bugs. Thus you can differentiate these tools easily.

Advantages of using Test Management Tool for bug tracking

The BrowserStack Test Management provides a reliable platform to manage your manual and automation testing. It has a central repository to manage your test cases efficiently. It tracks your test run and execution with the Test Observability. Finally, generate the standard test reports in different formats.

It allows bi-directional Jira binding and integration with automation frameworks – Selenium, Cypress, and more. Also, it covers seamless integration with CI/CD systems like Bamboo, Azure pipeline, and more.

Conclusion

The bug tracking tools in software testing helps the developers and testers to produce quality products for their business requirement. If your aim is tracking the bugs and generating reports, then you can use a bug tracking tool.

But when you need to consider the entire SDLC you must use the product management tools and for STLC you need test management tools. Defect tracking is a part of the SDLC and STLC. So, you will get all the bug-tracking solutions from the product and test management tools. With BrowserStack you will get all these solutions from one platform. It helps in software testing for small teams, large teams, and as well as individuals.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

• Is Jira a bug tracking tool?

Jira is an agile project management tool, offers excellent bug and issue-tracking facilities.

• What is an example of a tracking tool?

Kualitee is an example of a bug tracking tool.

• Why do we use bug tracking tools?

We use bug tracking tools to identify, track, generate reports, and resolve the bugs.

• What is bug tracking in manual testing?

The bug tracking in manual testing occurs based upon some parameters – bug ID, priority, severity, creation date, resolving date, status, etc.