I do both. We setup usertesting.com every Friday to run through a preset script for both our web & mobile apps and then review the videos as a team and add a couple items to our backlog. The users are definitely not our ideal customers, but their perspective can be quite enlightening and it's just a great thing to have automated and run for $80/week.

As for user tests, we actually use Clarity to find target customers (not hard for us) and then schedule calls and use join.me to either show them clickeable prototypes (made with Keynote -> saved to PDF) or watch them interact with our app and ask questions. We typically only request calls with people who are $1/min, and most calls last 20 minutes - so it's pretty cheap testing :)

Hope that helps.

P.S. I still do manual / in person testing with anyone who's a target customer and has a laptop or iphone - but that's just my personality :)