In engineering and its various subdisciplines, acceptance testing is a test conducted to determine if the requirements of a specification or contract are met. In software testing, the ISTQB defines acceptance testing as:
Formal testing with respect to user needs, requirements, and business processes conducted to determine whether a system satisfies the acceptance criteria and to enable the user, customers or other authorized entity to determine whether to accept the system. — Standard Glossary of Terms used in Software Testing.
Acceptance testing is also known as user acceptance testing (UAT), end-user testing, operational acceptance testing (OAT), acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) or field (acceptance) testing. Acceptance criteria are the criteria that a system or component must satisfy in order to be accepted by a user, customer, or other authorized entity. To track and log the progress of User Acceptance Testing (UAT) engineers and organizations need a bug tracking tool also specially for large and complex projects, for benefits of the reader 10 best UAT Bug Tracking Tools are listed below;
Why do you need a bug tracking tool? Because there’s no such thing as software without bugs.
Unfortunately, these bugs can damage your reputation, cause a loss of revenue, and result in hours of time spent digging through logs in order to find and categorize the defect—which is why every dev team can benefit from bug tracking tools.
The Best Issue And Bug Tracking Tools List
Here’s a list of the top bug tracking tools included in this review, followed by a summary chart and detailed description of each tool below.
- monday.com – Best bug tracking tool for customization
- BugHerd – Best for tracking bugs visually
- Wrike – Best bug tracking tool for team collaboration
- DoneDone – Best for collaborative bug tracking
- Backlog – Best bug tracking tool for software development teams
- DebugMe – Best bug tracking tool for small and mid-size teams
- Zoho Bug Tracker – Best bug tracking tool for reporting features
- Bugyard – Best bug tracking tool for freelancers
- Rollbar – Best bug tracking tool for agile workflows
- MantisHub – Best bug tracking tool for integrations
By identifying bugs early on in the development process (and if possible, before the end user encounters them!), our teams stand a better chance of being able to make simple fixes with relatively low impact on project timelines and budgets. Likewise, providing an easy way for end users to report bugs to our dev teams helps us modify and enhance our product over time.
Bugs are a necessary evil, but they don’t have to be a pain to deal with. There are dozens of bug tracking tools that help streamline and organize the defect management process. In this review, I’ll explain what features to look for in these tools and the things to consider when trying to choose the right one. I also provide a detailed description of the best bug tracking software I’ve come across, with information on pricing, trials, integrations, pros, cons, and more.
We’ll start with a basic definition of bug tracking and a summary of what defect management tools do.
What Are Bug Tracking Tools?
Compared to a lot of other development tools, bug tracking tools are pretty straightforward: they help developers identify and fix bugs.
What Counts As A Software Bug?
Very quickly, I want to go over the definition of a bug. This is because bugs go by a few different names—what one team calls a bug, other teams might call an issue, error, defect, ticket, fault, problem, or incident. To pick a bug-tracking tool that fits your use case, you first need to have a clear idea of what exactly you consider to be a bug. Having a clear idea will help you choose a tool that does what you want it to do.
Bug vs. Issue
In general, people make a distinction between the concept of a bug and an issue (or use your own terms—maybe you use “defect” and “issue”, etc). Find a simple explanation below:
A bug is generally considered to be a defect (a flaw, mistake, error) in the codebase. As such, the solution involves steps like isolating and reproducing the bug and changing the codebase. To fix a bug, developers need information pertaining to its environment, operating system, browser version, etc (here’s a more in-depth definition of software bug).
An issue is generally considered to span a much broader range of potential shortcomings in a project or product—it’s not necessarily related to a problem with your code. Depending on your organization, an issue could be a customer complaint ticket generated through a report from the end user, an entry on the “requested features” list, a problem someone’s identified with your hardware configuration, or a concern from the design team regarding the user interface.
Bug-Tracking Tools Vs. Issue-Tracking Tools
In some cases, it’s fine to use “bug tracking tools” and “issue tracking tools” interchangeably, but in some cases, it makes sense to distinguish between them. This is because, for some organizations, issue management really does operate on an entirely different lifecycle from bug tracking. Issue management might be completely focused on the cycle of solving end-user complaints, requests, and questions—it may involve fixing a software defect, but it doesn’t always have to, and its main tasks might fall under the responsibility of a department that’s not your dev team.
What’s The Takeaway?
Simply keep in mind that when you’re looking at bug/issue tracking tools, you might simply want a tool to report and fix bugs (a defect tracker)—or you might want something that falls under the bigger umbrella of issue tracking. Broader issue management tools will generally offer more reporting and management features, along with a greater variety of user roles to capture input from and enable collaboration between customer service, project management, IT, design, etc, comprising an entire issue management system.
What Do Bug Tracking Tools Do? (And How Can They Help You?)
Whether you call them defect tracking tools or bug reporting tools, these tools are designed to bring bugs to your attention in a systematic way, providing as much environment data about bug as possible so it’s easier to isolate, backtrace, categorize, prioritize, and fix. Most defect trackers also provide features to help your teams unify and streamline the communication/collaboration that’s part of the bug fixing process.
In many cases, bug capturing tools are designed to serve a narrower purpose (record and track bugs), and they integrate with task management systems that allow you to perform the surrounding planning and management tasks. Other tools offer a more complete suite of software project management features. I’ve included both types of bug software in this review.
Here are the benefits of bug tracking tools:
- Supply a common, simple interface for sharing files and communication about bugs
- Provide notifications and records to help your team pace, track, and estimate bug-related work
- Provide a searchable database of bugs your dev team can reference in the future
- Automate manual tasks associated with capturing bugs and updating issues
And finally, because bugs are an inevitable part of the software development process, bug tracking tools aren’t a nice-to-have—they serve a critical function in that process.
The Best Bug Tracking Tools
Here are a few of the best bug tracker tools available. Read on to discover what they offer, how they differ from the others, and use cases they’re best suited for.
1- monday.com
monday.com is a great for managing scrum and agile teams, and although it’s suited to a wide range of business environments, it’s often used in software development. The platform includes a bug tracking template, and they’ve made a video showing how their own teams set up the platform to track bugs.
Additionally, the platform has robust time tracking capabilities and customizable notifications and automations. This helps you focus on what’s important and track bugs and bottlenecks easily. You can create, visualize and share your roadmap to keep everyone in sync. Backlogs, dependencies, and sprint planning are available as well in a very intuitive interface.
You can create forms in the platform or integrate to other tools. Moreover, thanks to shareable boards, you can share your project with partners for feedback. With completely customizable labels in the status column (with color coding), and the multiple views, monday.com helps teams see the real status of their projects and tasks.
While monday.com doesn’t offer many features specific to bug tracking (other tools offer features like webpage markup and a more robust set of issue management features) it does let you get an overview of work in progress, capacity, and effort.
monday.com’s integrations include project management apps like Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Jira, GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Typeform and many more, accessible via Zapier.
monday.com costs from $17/month for two users. The company’s customer support is available 24/7 by phone or email.
Summary of monday.com:
- On-site feedback: Pass
- Integration: Pass
- Issue status: Pass
- Notifications: Pass
- Reporting: Fail
2- BugHerd
BugHerd is a visual bug tracker that sits in a virtual layer on top of your website. Once installed either through browser extension or through a one-line JavaScript tag, it enables your team and clients to report bugs and manage all the communication to resolve them directly on your site. BugHerd is hailed for being intuitive and easy to use, especially with non-developers. Project managers of teams who handle a lot of client feedback on websites love BugHerd for the simplicity in gathering feedback from multiple sources and managing it to completion. BugHerd also offers zero-project limits on all their plans.
To report a bug, users point & click on website elements, to which you can add statuses, due dates, files, comments, etc. Feedback is automatically added to a customisable Kanban-style task management board, along with essential data (OS, browser, etc). When working on a mobile-friendly website, you can log tasks and manage your workflow across mobile devices.
Overall, Bugherd’s biggest benefit is its visual simplicity and ease of use, even for non-technical folks. Its biggest drawback is found in its lack of integration with WordPress, although you can bridge the gap with Zapier. Likewise, aside from task boards and task lists, BugHerd’s reporting features are pretty slim, but I expect you’ll be able to round out its reporting functionality with some native integrations that they have in the works at this moment. You can also export data from BugHerd in CSV, XML, and JSON formats.
BugHerd costs from $39/month for 5 users. They offer a discount of 20% for annual plans and a free 14-day trial with no credit card required.
Summary of BugHerd:
- On-site feedback: Pass
- Integration: Fail
- Issue status: Pass
- Notifications: Pass
- Reporting: Fail
3- Wrike
Wrike is an award-winning, easy-to-use project management software with bug tracking tools trusted by 20,000+ organizations worldwide. It’s suitable for teams with anywhere from five to an unlimited number of team members. The tool is highly configurable, and users can customize workflows, dashboards, reports, request forms, and more.
Wrike’s simple interface enables users to switch between Kanban boards, one-click Gantt charts, and traditional workload views, allowing them to choose how they’d like to track bugs. Wrike also features issue management, comprehensive reporting features, schedules, shared workflows, file sharing, and real-time collaboration.
Wrike has an easy-to-use, intuitive interface and navigation with distinct spaces, folders, and tasks. Users can toggle quickly between the home screen and timesheets, dashboards, calendars, reports, and the notification stream.
Wrike also offers a variety of specific solutions depending on the type of team or organization — including marketing teams and professional service teams. Users can also try a variety of templates for common processes such as bug tracking.
Wrike offers 400+ pre-built native integrations, including integrations with the most popular file management software from Microsoft, Google, and Dropbox, along with IT tools such as Jira and GitHub.
Pricing starts at $9.80 per user per month. There are four different price points, including a free version and plans which offer the ability to invite free external collaborators to a Paid Account
4- DoneDone
DoneDone is a collaborative bug tracker that gives your dev team a simple way to track bugs and fix them efficiently. DoneDone users access a sleek dashboard that displays all tasks and issues. These can be categorized by priority, due date, status, task name, assignee, and more.
DoneDone users can create unlimited bug tracking tasks manually in a few simple steps, or tasks can be automatically created by end-users via DoneDone’s “Mailboxes” feature. Mailboxes can be configured to accept inbound bug notices sent by end-users via embedded web forms or directly from emails sent to an email address of your choice. You can easily set up multiple Mailboxes to track bug notifications from multiple sources.
Most dev teams have repeatable processes to resolve issues. DoneDone allows users to create Custom Workflows and Statuses to save you time and energy while categorizing and assigning recurring issue types.
DoneDone has a mobile app and pre-built integrations with other applications such as Slack and Glip. The app has just about everything most teams need for an effective bug tracking system, yet DoneDone is still known for its simplicity. It’s robust enough to handle most bug tracking demands and simple enough that it can be used by non-technical employees for tracking other tasks.
DoneDone starts at $5/user/month. They offer a 20% discount for annual plans.
Summary of DoneDone:
- On-site feedback: Fail
- Integration: Pass
- Issue status: Pass
- Notifications: Pass
- Reporting: Pass
5- Backlog
Backlog is one of the more feature-rich bug tracking tools on this list and is really more of an online project management tool for developers rather than strictly a defect tracking tool. It includes features for task management, project management, bug tracking, and version control. Available both as a self-hosted solution and as a SaaS, it’s a good fit for teams of all sizes, from small teams to enterprises with thousands of users.
A main benefit of Backlog is its intuitive interface that’s easy for anyone to learn (developers, designers, clients)—it’s not solely designed for development teams, offering useful visualization and PM tools like burndown charts, git graphs, and Gantt charts. Much more than a bug-capturing tool, Backlog enables pull requests, merge requests, and branches, and it provides features for code review and collaboration (wiki, Git and Subversion repositories). At the same time, if you already have PM tools you’re happy with, Backlog’s rich feature set might not be as much of a consideration.
Backlog comes with a few useful pre-built integrations with Typetalk, Cacoo, Redmine, Jira Importer. iCal, email, and Google Sheets. For additional integrations you can build your own through the API. They also have an app for both Android and iOS, so your clients and teams can access the tool from mobile devices.
Backlog costs from $35/month for up to 30 users. They also offer a free version for up to 10 users and 1 project.
Summary of Backlog:
- On-site feedback: Fail
- Integration: Pass
- Issue status: Pass
- Notifications: Pass
- Reporting: Pass
6- DebugMe
DebugMe is a visual feedback and bug tracking tool with some really useful project management features built in. It’s a simple, easy-to-learn solution with minimal features, making it a good fit for small and mid-sized teams (their enterprise plan caps out at 60 users).
The main upside of this tool is that it’s straightforward to use and not overloaded with modules and features. On the other hand, it doesn’t offer anything in the way of reporting tools—for capturing and resolving bugs, it’s great, but it doesn’t do much else (which may be exactly what you need). The pricing reflects this, and it’s one of the more affordable bug tracking tools out there at $8/month for 10 users.
DebugMe provides teams and clients with the ability to leave on-site feedback in the form of highlights, pins, blackouts, and drawings. The screen capture tool automatically records important information about the OS, resolution, browser version, plugins, etc. You can communicate through comments, change the status of a bug, get notifications based on your role, and manage tasks on the app’s Kanban board.
DebugMe comes with native integrations with Trello, Redmine, Jira, Gmail, Pivotal Tracker, Teamwork, Visual Studio Online, Outlook, and Yahoo, and you can sync with other tools through Zapier.
DebugMe costs from $8/month for 10 users, and they also offer a free plan for 2 users.
Summary of DebugMe:
- On-site feedback: Pass
- Integration: Pass
- Issue status: Pass
- Notifications: Pass
- Reporting: Fail
7- Zoho Bug Tracker
Zoho advertises their bug tracker as “simple, fast and scalable”, and they deliver on this promise. Their tool enables you to record bugs and tracks them based on severity, due date, and custom-set statuses and fields.
Zoho Bug Tracker supplies an interface that you can personalize with their configuration tools, alongside a range of useful features for time management and project management (not just bug tracking). The reporting features let you see logged and resolved bugs in addition to team progress and milestones. The timesheet feature allows your team to log their hours. Notifications and newsfeeds keep the team up to date, and you can also automate your SLAs—set rules to trigger updates in other apps when changes are made within Zoho, or trigger an automated email to a client.
Overall, Zoho has better reporting, notifications, and integrations that many other bug tracking tools, so it’s a good choice for teams who need to distribute and access data about their bugs at various points in their workflow. However, it lacks the visual appeal of tools like BugHerd which allows clients and teams to leave feedback directly on web pages and images.
Zoho Bug Tracker comes with pre-built integrations with a large assortment of 3rd party tools: Crashlytics, Zapier, Dropbox, Box, GitHub, Bitbucket, Jira, OneDrive, Google Drive. It also sync with Zoho apps like Desk, Analytics, People, Books, Invoice, Docs, Forums, and Chat.
Zoho Bug Tracker costs from about $40/month for up to 15 users. They also over a freemium version for up to 5 users and 1 project.
Summary of Zoho Bug Tracker:
- On-site feedback: Fail
- Integration: Pass
- Issue status: Pass
- Notifications: Pass
- Reporting: Pass
8- Bugyard
Bugyard is designed to help you manage bugs, both during development with feedback from team members and clients and also on your live website with tools for capturing feedback from users. This is a simple, streamlined tool that works well for freelancers, small teams, and small-to-mid-sized agencies.
Bugyard isn’t bogged down with features, but it does include the bug tracking essentials. It provides a visual bug capture that automatically adds useful information to the capture (screenshot, technical metadata like browser, screen resolution and size, OS), as well as some simple collaboration tools for commenting and sharing feedback. Through its integration with Zendesk and Freshdesk, Bugyard also allows you to capture feedback from users on your live website and add those issues to your workflow.
Bugyard doesn’t have much in the way of task management or reporting features, so it’s best for teams who are already using other tools like Trello in order to manage their workflow, set statuses and priorities, etc. For now, Bugyard’s integrations are minimal but useful: Zendesk, Freshdesk, Trello, Gmail, and Slack.
Bugyard costs from €9/month for 2 users.
Summary of Bugyard:
- On-site feedback: Pass
- Integration: Pass
- Issue status: Pass (through integrations)
- Notifications: Pass
- Reporting: Pass (through integrations)
9- Rollbar
Unlike most other tools on this list, Rollbar is designed to help you debug your software in production—it’s not a client feedback tool, but rather an error monitoring tool for agile deployment and continuous delivery. As such, it provides features for development teams to to get real-time visibility into errors, trace their root cause, and manage issues through to resolution.
Rollbar offers some best-in-class issue tracking features, including a real-time error feed, instant notifications that can be sent through your existing project tools, and impact analysis tools. It automatically gathers data about an error (HTTP request parameter, browser, OS, language, etc). Another useful function this tool performs: Rollbar uses a proprietary technology to automatically group similar errors together, reducing noise for your dev team as they sift through errors.
Rollbar offers a large number of native integrations: Asana, Bitbucket, Campfire, Heroku, GitLab, Help Scout, Datadog, Engine Yard, Flowdock, GitHub, HipChat, Clubhouse, OpsGenie, Pagerduty, Pivotal Tracker, Slack, Split, Sprintly, Trello, VictorOps, Webhooks, Codeship, Buddy, Bash, Octopus, Powershell, Jira, Jenkins, Ansible, Capistrano, Fabric, MSBuild, and Google Cloud.
Rollbar costs from $41/month. They also offer a free version for side projects and hobbies.
Summary of Rollbar:
- On-site feedback: Fail
- Integration: Pass
- Issue status: Pass
- Notifications: Pass
- Reporting: Pass
10- MantisHub
Founded by a MantisBT project lead, (MantisBT is a free, open source bug tracker has been around since 2000), MantisHub is a SaaS bug tracking tool that offers a powerful suite of issue management, customer support, project management, release management, and reporting features.
For the price, MantisHub provides a larger-than-average array of features—personalized dashboards, access controls for administrators, team members, and clients, customizable issue fields, notifications, comments, a built-in customer support platform, project timelines with a live activity stream, time-tracking, and plenty of graphical reporting tools.
MantisHub also touts a long list of plug-ins, along with built-in integrations with Clockify and Toggl to import MantisHub issue data directly into those time-tracking apps. MantisHub also integrates with other tools like Slack, JetBrains, and Eclipse IDEs (and your dev team can use the MantisHub API with C# and PHP client SDKs in order to integrate with the tools you’re using).
Mantis costs from $4.95/month for 5 users and 1 project.
Summary of MantisHub:
- On-site feedback: Fail
- Integration: Pass
- Issue status: Pass
- Notifications: Pass
- Reporting: Pass
Bug Tracking Tools Selection Criteria
In putting together this review, I looked for defect trackers that met all or most of this key criteria:
- On-site feedback: enables clients or team members to annotate, highlight, pin, or otherwise leave feedback to identify and describe a bug directly on the site. This is useful because it provides context that makes it easy to understand the issue they’re referring to.
- Integration: integrates with common project management management tools, directly exports data into and generates notifications within those tools in order to help you manage your bug tracking from a single place.
- Issue status: provides the ability to set and change an issue’s status. Some of the better tools also have some level of automation—when an issue’s status changes, it sends automatic alerts to certain users or it automatically updates the issue in the task board.
- Notifications: offers either in-app notifications (basic) or notifications within third party apps (even better) when a bug is reported, assigned, resolved, commented on, etc. The better tools allow you to customize your notifications and/or receive tailored notifications according to your user role (admin, developer, client, etc)
- Reporting: at the very least, provides a task list or overview with a record of issues and all of their associated statuses, labels, assignees, etc.
- Price: A good bug-tracking tool should have transparent, flexible pricing. Your price per user can vary greatly between less than $1.00 per user per month to $15.00 per user per month. As a ballpark figure, an average bug tracking tool price per user is around $3.00-$5.00 per user per month.
Other Features To Consider
Some of the top software issue tracking tools on the market also supply functionality like prioritization logic (helps automatically determine which bugs to fix, in what order, and how long it’ll take). In addition to being a simple bug capturing tools, some also supply performance measures designed to give insight to management for maintaining schedules and coordinating work across teams. However, in this review, I focus on reviewing tools based on the core bug-tracking tool criteria listed above.
How To Pick The Best Bug Tracking Tool For Your Team?
First and foremost, the great thing about choosing a bug tracking tool is that almost all of them are low-risk—they’re simple tools that are easy to access and get the feel for in free trials. Overall, they’re a low-risk, lightweight investment that doesn’t impact much of your existing infrastructure.
Even so, you can save yourself the hassle of going through a string of different bug tracking tools by asking yourself these important qualifying questions for choosing the right one:
What Do You Need It For?
Bug tracking tools are designed for a few different use case scenarios. Find the right fit here:
- If you need to find errors and bugs throughout your development cycle, look to developer-focused tools like Rollbar.
- If you need a tool for clients to give your teams feedback. Bugherd, DebugMe, Marker, and Bugyard are great visual tools that are easy for clients to learn and use.
- If you’re looking for something that helps you manage user feedback and provide customer support on top of simple issue tracking, look at tools like MantisHub or DoneDone.
What’s Your Team Size?
Before you fall in love with a tool, check into how many users it supports. While some tools can support an enterprise level team, a lot of bug trackers are really designed for small or mid-sized teams and they have a limit on the maximum number of users. Tools like Backlog, Zoho Bug Tracker, and DoneDone are great for large, distributed teams. Tools like DebugMe and Bugyard are designed for small and mid-sized teams.
How Many Projects Do You Need To Test?
A lot of bug-tracking tools price their plans according to active projects along with users, so you should consider how many projects you’ll need to test. Tools that offer unlimited projects like Bugherd, Backlog, Zoho Bug Tracker, DoneDone, Bugyard, and Marker.io are good for teams with lots of projects.
How Would It Fit Into Your Workflow And Current Toolset?
Most bug tracking tools aren’t designed as stand-alone tools. In fact, several tools on this list, like DebugMe, Bugyard, and Marker.io offer minimal features beyond simple bug capture and tracking, so it’s a good idea to check out the project management tools they integrate with (Trello, Slack, and Jira are common ones) and see if those are a fit for your workflow. If you’re not already using those additional project tools, how would adopting it affect your workflow, budget, etc?
On the other hand, a few tools do provide additional functionality for tracking and analyzing your projects, tasks, and time. These include Backlog, DoneDone, Rollbar, and MantisHub —good options if you’re not heavily invested in other projects, tasks, and time management tools.
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