As the quality of welded joints transfers to the load carrying capacity of structures, welded joints naturally become the object of diagnostic tests. Welded joints are mainly tested in order to find out the places with structural or mechanical non-homogeneities. It is caused by the fact that the existence of welding imperfections significantly decreases mechanical properties of the welded joint and especially its fatigue strength. The paper presents some results of diagnostic tests for welded joints of steel components carried out with the use of passive and active magnetic methods. Faults of the welded joint occurring within a tested object cause the phenomenon of magnetic anomalies existing over a tested surface and this phenomenon has been used to detect welding imperfections. A specially designed measurement matrix consisting of 768 one-axial miniature magnetic field sensors has been used to record the magnetic flux leakage. The paper includes a comparison of the effectiveness of diagnosing using the passive and active magnetic method. Moreover, it was shown that the magnetic diagnostics provides rapid inspection of quality of welded joints with no need for special preparation of joints for testing which is relevant for its practical applications and results in low costs of such tests.