Software testing certifications
Which testing certification is worth having depends entirely on what you are being asked to prove. A tester moving into their first QA role and a tester who has been automating for five years need different things, and the wrong certificate is an expensive way to learn that. This page lists the certifications testers actually encounter, with what each one covers, who awards it, and whether it costs anything.
Every link goes to the awarding body rather than to a training provider. That is deliberate: the body that writes the syllabus is the only source guaranteed to be current about the exam format, the prerequisites and the fee, and it is the only way to publish a list like this honestly. This site earns nothing from these links and must not look as though it does.
Cost is shown as Free or Paid, never as a number. Exam fees vary by country, by exam board, by currency and by year — ISTQB alone is priced separately by every national board that administers it — so a figure written here would be wrong somewhere on the day it was published and wrong nearly everywhere within a year. A stale price is worse than none, because people plan around it.
Free means the certificate itself is free, not that free study material exists. Almost every paid certification has free notes, videos and practice questions somewhere, and that does not make the certification free. Where a course is free but the exam is chargeable, it is listed as Paid.
Each entry says how widely it is recognized, because that is usually the question behind the question. Internationally recognized means a scheme with an exam that turns up in job adverts across countries — ISTQB, BCS, CompTIA, AWS, Oracle, Microsoft, IAAP, Scrum.org and Scaled Agile. A vendor credential is issued by one company and is worth what that company's tooling is worth to the team hiring you: real, and narrower. Neither is better; they answer different questions.
Some entries are not certifications at all, and they are the ones worth reading twice. Selenium, JMeter, the OWASP Top Ten and WCAG issue nothing — they are open projects and published standards. They appear here because certifications in those areas are examining your understanding of exactly that material, which is free, complete and written by the people who built the thing. Knowing that before you pay for a course is the point.
There is no separate "manual testing" certification, and looking for one is a common way to waste money. The foundation certificates — ISTQB CTFL, the BCS equivalent, the IIST tracks — are manual testing certifications: test design techniques, equivalence partitioning, boundary values, exploratory charters and defect reporting are what they examine. Automation is a later, separate syllabus, which is why the foundation ones are listed first here.
Four certifications that appear on every other list of this kind are missing here, and it is worth saying why. CAST, CSTE, CSQA and CMST — the QAI family — currently have no reachable official home. Their awarding body, Software Certifications, has served an expired TLS certificate since February 2026, so a browser shows a security warning instead of the page; the bare domain does not resolve at all; QAI Global Institute's own certifications page now lists Scrum, SAFe and DevOps courses with none of the four; and PeopleCert, whose name is on that expired certificate, has no trace of them either. Checked September 2026. They may well still be administered somewhere, but a certification with no working link is not one this page can honestly recommend.
Certifications are filtered here by what they cover — foundation, automation, API, database, performance, security, agile, mobile and accessibility — because that is how the decision is usually framed. A foundation certificate answers a different question from a performance one, and the two are rarely alternatives to each other.
Certified Tester Foundation Level (CTFL) — awarded by ISTQB. Foundation, Paid, internationally recognized. The most widely recognized entry point into software testing, and the one most job adverts name. Covers the fundamentals of testing, the test process, static testing, test techniques, test management and tool support. No prior qualification is required, and it is the prerequisite for every higher ISTQB level.
Certified Tester Foundation Level Agile Tester — awarded by ISTQB. Agile, Paid, internationally recognized. An extension of the Foundation Level for testers working in Scrum and other agile teams. Covers the tester's role in an agile team, user stories and acceptance criteria, test automation in a sprint, and the techniques that fit short iterations. Requires the Foundation Level certificate first.
Certified Tester Advanced Level Test Automation Engineer — awarded by ISTQB. Automation, Paid, internationally recognized. For testers who design and maintain automation rather than only write scripts. Covers automation architecture, the generic test automation architecture model, deployment risks, reporting and metrics, and how to keep a suite maintainable as it grows. Foundation Level is a prerequisite.
Certified Tester Foundation Level Performance Testing — awarded by ISTQB. Performance, Paid, internationally recognized. Covers the concepts behind load, stress, soak and spike testing rather than one particular tool. Includes performance risks, test planning, workload modeling, metrics and result analysis, and where performance work fits in the development lifecycle. Foundation Level is a prerequisite.
Certified Tester Foundation Level Mobile Application Testing — awarded by ISTQB. Mobile, Paid, internationally recognized. Aimed at testers working on mobile apps, where the device, the network and the operating system are all variables. Covers mobile-specific risks, test types, device and emulator strategy, and the tooling used for mobile test execution. Foundation Level is a prerequisite.
Certified Tester Security Tester (CT-SEC) — awarded by ISTQB. Security, Paid, internationally recognized. Security testing from a tester's perspective rather than a penetration tester's. Covers the purpose of security testing, risk assessment, security test planning and techniques, and how security testing fits into the wider test process and lifecycle. Foundation Level is a prerequisite.
Certified Tester AI Testing (CT-AI) — awarded by ISTQB. AI, Paid, internationally recognized. The vendor-neutral answer to testing AI systems, and the certification to look at before any vendor's course. Covers what makes AI-specific quality characteristics testable, bias and fairness, testing machine-learning models, and using AI to support testing. Foundation Level is a prerequisite.
Foundation Certificate in Software Testing — awarded by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. Foundation, Paid, internationally recognized. The BCS route to a foundation testing qualification, widely recognized in the UK and accredited to the ISTQB Foundation syllabus. Covers the same core material — test process, techniques, management and tooling — and is often the version offered by UK training providers and employers.
Postman API Fundamentals Student Expert — awarded by Postman. API, Free, a vendor credential. A free, self-paced badge covering the basics of working with APIs in Postman: sending requests, reading responses, variables and environments, and writing assertions in the built-in test scripts. Postman Academy carries the follow-on automation paths too — collection runs, data-driven requests and running a collection from the command line.
Test Automation University — awarded by Applitools. Automation, Free, a vendor credential. A free course library rather than a single exam, with certificates issued per course and a points system across them. Covers Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Appium, API testing and programming foundations in several languages, taught by practitioners in the field.
BrowserStack Test University — awarded by BrowserStack. Automation, Free, a vendor credential. Free courses with certificates, aimed squarely at UI testing across real browsers and devices. Covers Selenium, Cypress and Playwright fundamentals, cross-browser strategy, and the parts specific to running against a device cloud — parallelisation, waits and why a suite passes locally and fails on a real phone.
Cypress real world testing — awarded by Cypress. Automation, Free, a vendor credential. A free course from the makers of Cypress, working through a realistic application rather than toy examples. Covers test structure, selectors, network stubbing, authentication and the patterns that keep an end-to-end suite stable. Completion is tracked, with no exam fee.
Software testing certifications (CSTP, CTM, CAST and others) — awarded by IIST. Foundation, Paid, internationally recognized. The International Institute for Software Testing runs an education-based scheme: you earn the credential by completing courses and assessments rather than by sitting one multiple-choice exam. Tracks cover test professional, test manager and test automation, including the manual test design that the tool certifications skip.
Certified Agile Tester (CAT) — awarded by iSQI. Agile, Paid, internationally recognized. A practical agile testing certification with a written exam and an assessed practical component, rather than multiple choice alone. Covers the tester's place in an agile team, planning and estimation, and the soft skills the syllabus treats as testable — which is unusual and is the point of it.
A4Q certifications — awarded by Alliance for Qualification. Automation, Paid, internationally recognized. An independent certification body whose portfolio sits alongside ISTQB's, including Selenium tester, AI and design thinking credentials. Useful where a tool-specific but vendor-neutral certificate is wanted — the Selenium one certifies the tool without belonging to a company that sells it.
Certified Quality Engineer (CQE) — awarded by ASQ. Foundation, Paid, internationally recognized. A quality engineering certification from outside software, and the broadest on this list. Covers quality management, statistics, metrology and continuous improvement. Testers meet it in regulated industries — medical, automotive, aerospace — where quality assurance is an engineering discipline with its own body of knowledge.
GitHub Certifications (Foundations, Actions, Advanced Security) — awarded by GitHub. Cloud, Paid, internationally recognized. Relevant to testers because the pipeline is where a suite actually runs. Foundations covers repositories, branching and pull requests; Actions covers building workflows, which is how automated tests get triggered, and Advanced Security covers code and secret scanning as part of the same pipeline.
Salesforce Certified Administrator — awarded by Salesforce. Platform, Paid, internationally recognized. There is no Salesforce tester certification, and this is the one testers on Salesforce projects take instead. Covers objects, fields, validation rules, profiles, permission sets, flows and reports — which is precisely the configuration that decides whether a defect is a bug or a setting.
SAP certifications — awarded by SAP. Platform, Paid, internationally recognized. SAP issues no dedicated tester credential either, so testers on SAP programmes certify in the module they test — finance, logistics, HR — or in SAP's own build and automation tooling. Worth browsing by module rather than by role, since that is how the portfolio is organised.
Atlassian certifications (Jira and Confluence) — awarded by Atlassian. Test management, Paid, a vendor credential. For testers who live in Jira rather than merely file tickets in it. Covers configuring projects, workflows, screens and permission schemes — the parts that decide whether a defect can be tracked properly, and the ones a test lead is usually asked to own alongside the test plan.
Katalon Academy certifications — awarded by Katalon. Automation, Free, a vendor credential. Free structured tracks for Katalon Studio, tiered from practitioner to professional, with certification at each level. Aimed at testers moving from manual work into low-code or keyword-driven automation, covering web, API and cross-browser execution without writing framework code.
Tricentis Academy (Tosca and NeoLoad) — awarded by Tricentis. Automation, Free, a vendor credential. The training platform behind the Tosca Automation Specialist and NeoLoad credentials, which turn up in enterprise and banking environments where codeless automation is mandated. The academy courses are open to sign up for; the specialist certifications themselves are arranged through Tricentis.
Test automation certifications — awarded by LambdaTest. Automation, Free, a vendor credential. Free certifications in Selenium, Playwright, Cypress and Appium, aimed at running suites on a cross-browser grid rather than only writing them locally. Assessed by exam plus a practical submission, which makes them harder to pass by reading and more useful as evidence.
OpenText functional and performance testing credentials — awarded by OpenText. Automation, Paid, a vendor credential. The home of UFT (formerly QTP) and LoadRunner, both still in heavy use for enterprise regression and load testing. Certifications cover building and maintaining UFT suites and running LoadRunner scenarios at the scale those licences are bought for.
MySQL Explorer — awarded by Oracle MyLearn. Database, Free, a vendor credential. A free badge covering MySQL fundamentals — schemas, queries, joins and the data types behind them. Aimed at testers who need to verify what actually landed in the database rather than trusting the screen, which is the difference between checking a feature and testing it.
Testsigma Academy certification courses — awarded by Testsigma. Automation, Free, a vendor credential. Free, self-paced courses from a low-code automation vendor, with a certificate on completion. Covers building and maintaining automated tests without writing framework code, plus the concepts — locators, waits, data-driven runs — that transfer to any tool. Useful if your team is evaluating low-code automation.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner — awarded by Amazon Web Services. Cloud, Paid, internationally recognized. The entry point into the AWS certification track, and the one testers usually take first. Covers cloud concepts, core AWS services, security and compliance, and billing. Useful when the system under test lives on AWS and the environments are yours to understand rather than guess at.
AWS Certified Developer – Associate — awarded by Amazon Web Services. Cloud, Paid, internationally recognized. A step beyond the practitioner exam, for testers embedded in teams building on AWS. Covers development with AWS services, deployment, security, troubleshooting and optimisation — including the CI/CD tooling a test suite usually has to run inside.
Anthropic Academy — building with Claude — awarded by Anthropic. AI, Free, a vendor credential. Free, self-paced courses on working with Claude: prompting, the API, tool use and agents. Relevant to testers because the same material covers how to evaluate model output — which is the part of an AI feature that most resembles testing and least resembles anything else.
Database SQL Certified Associate — awarded by Oracle. Database, Paid, internationally recognized. For testers who need to prove they can query and verify data rather than only read a result set. Covers SQL fundamentals, joins, subqueries, set operators, data manipulation and the data-dictionary views used to check what a schema actually contains.
Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-900) — awarded by Microsoft. AI, Paid, internationally recognized. An entry-level AI credential worth pairing with ISTQB's CT-AI: where that one covers how to test an AI system, this covers what the system is made of — machine learning workloads, computer vision, natural language processing and generative AI on Azure. The study path on Microsoft Learn is free; the exam is not.
Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) — awarded by Microsoft. Cloud, Paid, internationally recognized. The Azure equivalent of the AWS practitioner exam, and the one to take when the system under test runs on Azure. Covers cloud concepts, core Azure services, management and governance, and pricing — enough to reason about the environments a test suite deploys into rather than guess at them.
Azure Data Fundamentals (DP-900) — awarded by Microsoft. Database, Paid, internationally recognized. An entry-level data certification useful to testers working against cloud databases. Covers core data concepts, relational and non-relational stores, and analytics workloads on Azure. Microsoft Learn hosts the full study path free; only the exam itself is chargeable.
BlazeMeter University — awarded by BlazeMeter. Performance, Free, a vendor credential. Free performance-testing courses with a certificate on completion, taught around JMeter and BlazeMeter's own platform. Covers building a load test, scripting and correlation, running at scale, and reading the results — the practical half that the vendor-neutral syllabi describe but do not demonstrate.
Security+ — awarded by CompTIA. Security, Paid, internationally recognized. A vendor-neutral security certification that testers move into when security becomes part of the remit. Covers threats and vulnerabilities, architecture, operations, incident response and governance. Widely listed in job requirements for security-adjacent QA roles.
Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) — awarded by IAAP. Accessibility, Paid, internationally recognized. The foundational accessibility certification, covering disabilities and assistive technology, accessibility standards and law, and the principles of universal design. Broader than the web: it is about accessible design generally rather than a single technique or tool.
Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I) — awarded by Scrum.org. Agile, Paid, internationally recognized. Useful to testers working in Scrum teams who want the process vocabulary to match their colleagues'. Covers the Scrum framework, roles, events and artefacts, and empirical process control. The Scrum Guide it is based on is free; the assessment is chargeable and can be taken without a course.
SAFe Practitioner — awarded by Scaled Agile. Agile, Paid, internationally recognized. For testers inside organizations that have adopted the Scaled Agile Framework, where the ceremonies and planning cadence differ from single-team Scrum. Covers the framework, program increment planning, and how a team's work fits into a larger train of teams.