10 Best Tools For Visual Regression Testing

Think about coming across a website with a poorly designed interface, slow page loading, or pixelized images. What will you do? Leave the website instantly. Correct? This is especially so in today’s world, where if one wants to create brand awareness, one has to ensure as many people as possible visit one’s website or download one’s apps. To achieve this, your website or mobile apps must be well-designed and have a similar user interface as each other. Forbes also stated that about 38% of users will avoid a website if it is visually unappealing. This is where visual testing comes into the equation.

Visual regression testing helps verify that an application works and looks as expected after changes have been made to it. It checks that the changes do not affect how the application’s user interface looks to the end users.

Automated visual testing tools work as special detectives for applications similar to how regular investigators work for crimes. They compare screenshots of an application taken at two different times to determine if there are slightest differences in its appearance or behavior. They then compare these images to see whether there are any changes in the user interface, including color change, font change or change in layout.

In addition, it is critical for each upgrade to maintain the visual elements of your product. That is why it is crucial to select the most suitable tool for visual regression testing that will pinpoint the problems and defects. Below we list the top 10 tools that will help you choose the one that is perfect for you.

Top 10 Visual Regression Testing Tools

Let's take a closer look at the top 10 visual regression testing tools, each with its own set of unique functions and features:

TestGrid

TestGrid is an AI-powered end-to-end testing platform that can run tests on hundreds of browsers and real mobile devices in the cloud or on-premises. TestGrid enables you to test mobile, web, and desktop applications and has features, such as codeless AI testing, visual testing, cross-browser testing, and guarantees that users have a consistent and perfect experience every time they use an application.

Features:

• With TestGrid, users can perform visual testing on app and website changes without relying on external SDKs and tools.
• Enables you to perform cross browser tests without coding and with artificial intelligence on over 1000 real browsers, devices, and OSes.
• Improves software quality by catching the errors at an early stage and shortens the delivery time by refining and streamlining the testing process.
• It offers both automated and manual testing of mobile applications on real devices.
• It makes your API testing procedure 70% faster.
• Can pick even slight changes in the look, so you can fix them before your product is released to the public, and the final result will be perfect.
• TestGrid’s AI does the rest for you – you only need to input a few lines of code.

Cypress

Cypress is an end-to-end tool for testing anything that is accessible in a browser. This tool is fast, efficient and user friendly when it comes to setting up, creating test cases and running tests. One major advantage of Cypress testing is that for any of the plugins that are available, you can capture images of the application and then check if they are similar.

Features:

• Takes screenshots automatically if a failure occurs while the program is running a test.
• It is easy to set up and run the first test:
• Cypress is also very useful to evaluate the usability of the web, mobile, and desktop applications interfaces

Needle

Needle is a popular open-source tool that follows the generic visual testing pattern, where it compares the layout of an app to the set of images taken earlier. It takes screenshots of website portions and checks if visuals, like images of fonts, are rendering correctly.

Features:

• Needle can rapidly test and deploy, allowing for almost instant super-fast iteration in seconds.
• It ensures that the quality of the user experience is seamless on all devices and form factors, including smartphones, desktops, tablets, AR/VR, and much more.
• For failed test cases, there are different PNG files made using ImageMagick and PerceptualDiff.

Vizregress

Vizregress is able to identify visual changes in your favorite web app by comparing a shot with the set of approved ones. You can draw attention to areas that are easily lost in the differences, which is highly beneficial when considering elements that may change over time.

Features

• It uses Selenium WebDriver to provide Visual Regression Testing and facilitates continuous delivery with the help of Jenkins.
• Enables you to illuminate regions of your website that you would prefer the tool to skip from scanning during the testing process.
• AForge and SeleniumWebDriver intersected, where Vizregress provides a solid solution to complex problems.

PhantomCSS

PhantomCSS helps in test case evaluation and identifies visual modifications within web applications. It consists of important components like CasperJS and ResembleJs.

Features

• Combined with the CasperJS module, the platform is the most valuable for testers and developers who worked with the codebase provided by a customer or another developer.
• PhantomCSS lets you perform visual testing on your UI and CSS code
• It lets you create manual tests of your user interface

Wraith

Wraith is a visual regression testing tool that helps to compare screenshots and provides a responsive screenshot comparison feature. It works in a headless browser and can be easily downloaded and incorporated into the work process.

Features

• Wraith supports CasperJS, PhantomJS, ImageMagick, and Ruby23.
• It provides you with the ability to capture screenshots of the pages you have opened in its headless browser.
• It enables you to start with the automation of visual regression testing at once, by just modifying the existing config files. Hence, you do not need to write a single line of code.

Kobiton

Kobiton is a reliable testing platform for visual testing that checks the UI of an app on real devices to ensure that the app looks the same across multiple devices. It can compare each page across different devices and detect such visual defects as page layout, structure, and color.

Features

• Allows you to take screenshots, compare them to normal images and search for the differences on emulators and actual devices.
• It helps in cross-browser compatibility and supports multiple operating systems, browsers and device models.
• Results are obtained faster, the waiting time for the response is also minimized, and many devices are tested at once.

Chromatic

Chromatic is well known for its integration with the Storybook, which is a widely used tool for UI elements development. As it is connected with Storybook, and its analysis and testing are performed by AI, it can be an advantage for teams who already use Storybook or need a simple tool for visual testing.

Features

• It automatically validates the Storybook stories, using the previously defined component definitions and conditions to create tests for Storybook even more quickly.
• It can take screenshots during CI/CD processes and development, compare them to previous ones, and detect new regressions.
• Baselines adjust themselves to approved alterations, thus reducing the overall maintenance expenses.

Functionize

Functionize offers visual regression testing in the cloud, in addition to performance testing and accessibility testing. It has a friendly user interface and it can expand and shrink depending on the number of team members or the project’s needs.

Features

• The best part is that it does not need any setup locally; you can run tests and see the results from any device connected to the internet.
• It has tests that can be scheduled to run at certain times, and it notifies you when there are failures.
• It provides a comprehensive report for each test which contains the visual comparison, comments and results of the test whether it is passed or not.

Backstopjs

It is a preferred choice for the visual regression tool that is easy to use and does not require much intervention from the developers. It is convenient for developers since it uses a familiar syntax to define visual tests in JavaScript.

Features

• Provides integration with Playwright and Puppeteer for running tests across different devices and browsers.
• It comes with a simple and easy-to-use command line interface for running tests.
• It has a vibrant community backing it, and as such, there are many resources available.

Conclusion

There are several tools in the market that provide automated visual testing; choose one that fits your needs, cost, and goals. Think about the criteria provided for each tool, and you may use other tools through demonstrations or by availing of the free trial. In this way, you can identify which solution is most suitable to assist your team in designing uniform and effective UI/UX concepts.

Based on the criteria, it is clear that TestGrid is an AI-powered, codeless platform that stands out from the rest.

TestGrid captures changes in the appearance of applications and websites and enables you to provide users with perfect experiences consistently. The platform carefully checks every single element that you are going to put in the interface of the application, whether text, videos, layouts, images, and so on. It identifies visual issues early in the development process and reduces the possibility of bugs getting to the production phase.