Screenshotbot Overview

Screenshotbot is an enterprise-grade Screenshot Testing platform. Screenshot testing might also be called snapshot testing, or visual regression testing.

Screenshotbot does not care how you generate your screenshots. As long as you can create a directory of screenshots during your CI run, you can integrate with Screenshotbot.

Screenshotbot is trusted by respected companies such as ForeFlight, Apadmi, Tractive and many others. Our customers are well-known brands across many fields: tech, banking, education, construction and even dating.

Overview of CI integration

Screenshotbot provides a command-line tool (CLI), that you would call during your CI job once your directory of screenshots is created. At this point, we'll upload the screenshots (taking care to not re-upload screenshots we've already seen before).

We automatically extract build information from the CI environment to provide build status updates and Pull Request notifications. If any screenshots changed, we'll mark your Pull Request as Action Required.

Overview of the developer experience

If screenshots changed, we mark the Pull Request as Action Required. At this point the developer clicks the link that takes them to Screenshotbot, and they can review the screenshots. Once they're happy with the changes they can Accept the changes in Screenshotbot.

This in-turn will turn the build to green, and the developer will be able to merge the Pull Request.

Compared to record/verify

If you've worked with screenshot tests without Screenshotbot, you might be familiar with "record" and "verify". This required developers to re-record screenshots manually each time screenshots change.

• It required developers to run tests locally, instead of in CI.
• Often, your first Pull Request would fail when screenshots change, and you would have to re-run your Pull Request builds. This is a significant overhead both from a cost and developer productivity perspective.
• Since screenshots were recorded on developers' laptops, screenshots are more likely to be flaky and have minor rendering differences based on the hardware or OS used.

Screenshotbot is a much more scalable and pleasant developer experience compared to record/verify.

Screenshot storage

All screenshots are stored on Screenshotbot, which means you no longer need to maintain your own GitLFS infrastructure.