Applitools Eyes

What do you like best about the product?

The standout capability for me is the Ultrafast Test Grid (UFG). It lets us scale visual tests smoothly across multiple desktop browsers, different viewport sizes, and mobile devices at the same time. As a result, we get broad responsive coverage right away without needing to build, host, or maintain a complex internal testing infrastructure.

Integrating the SDK into our existing automation framework was very straightforward and felt like a quick win for the team. On the execution side, being able to switch between Layout and Dynamic matching modes keeps our visual assertions highly stable and effectively removes the flaky false positives that are usually caused by dynamic data or shifting content. The Root Cause Analysis (RCA) feature is also exceptionally precise: when a mismatch happens, it points directly to the specific DOM changes or element displacement in the code, saving our developers hours of debugging time.

The Applitools support team is exceptionally responsive and proactive. Our weekly collaboration sessions have been invaluable, allowing us to quickly clarify technical queries and resolve roadblocks. This high-touch support has directly helped us build a highly robust, scalable testing framework for our responsive web applications in quick time.

What do you dislike about the product?

While the platform is highly efficient, there are a few notable gaps in the administrative and reporting tools. Right now, there’s no native option in the Applitools dashboard to set up automated alerts for usage thresholds when our team reaches a specific consumption tier, which makes proactive budget tracking difficult. In addition, the dashboard doesn’t provide a granular view of usage metric for example, a breakdown showing which specific pages are consuming our monthly license quota. Having a more detailed metrics dashboard would give us much better visibility and help us align the test suites we build with the actual resource consumption reflected on our monthly invoice. Finally, optimizing the initial test configuration for complex responsive layouts takes time.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We struggled to verify responsive layout consistency across an ever-growing matrix of browser versions and mobile viewports. Manual checks were too slow, and pixel-matching tools failed constantly because of minor rendering differences. Applitools Eyes addresses this by shifting the focus to AI-driven validation using DOM-based and different visual modes.

The centralized dashboard has also unified our workflow by enabling developers, QA testers, and Product Owners (POs) to collaborate in one place. We can review baseline changes and sign off on visual deployments together. This cross-functional visibility helps ensure design consistency across all form factors, while keeping our release cycles fast and predictable and allowing us to catch regression leaks early when visual changes slip in.

With UFG, we’re able to test many different combinations at once, very quickly, without needing to set up the infrastructure. As a result, we save time and effort.

What do you like best about the product?

AI Intelligence , Support, Adoption for customer requirement and Integrations with SDK kit and Initutive UI.

What do you dislike about the product?

Applitools could improve its notifications for the emailable report after comparisons. I would like more detailed English sentences that clearly explain formatting, font, and other visual differences, along with the RCA category and the AI recommendations.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Visual testing and PDF comparison for both content and visuals.

What do you like best about the product?

The platform has many useful features, such as layout regions. UFG is also a strong feature. It’s good to see that they’re moving toward AI code generation using MCPs.

What do you dislike about the product?

the platform has so many feOne area that could be improved is baseline image maintenance. As the number of visual tests grows, managing and updating baselines can become time-consuming, especially when there are expected UI changes across multiple tests.

Additionally, Applitools offers many powerful features, but there is sometimes a communication gap around new releases and capabilities. At least for my team, we are not always aware of newly introduced features or best practices unless we actively look for them. More proactive communication, release summaries, in-product announcements, or feature walkthroughs would help teams discover and adopt new functionality more effectively.
atures. But some times I

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use Applitools primarily for Visual Regression Testing (VRT). It helps us automatically detect unintended UI changes across our applications, allowing us to identify visual defects early in the development cycle before they reach production.

This has improved our confidence in releases, reduced the need for manual UI validation, and helped us catch issues that traditional functional automation might miss. Overall, it has contributed to better software quality while saving time and effort during regression testing.

What do you like best about the product?

Not much. Now that I'm seeing the question, I don't have many positive things to say about it.

I guess... I like that the filters view lets me see only things that need approval.

What do you dislike about the product?

Most of it.

It's slow. That's a major complaint, and a lot of things simply don't work right.

We had this issue where we needed to add ignore zones, and Applitools even helpfully helped us find those and ignore them, and it asked us to ignore them on the next PR, and the next, and the next. Seems to always be super buggy.

Some years ago, we got flagged for old npm packages, and we found that they were coming from the latest eyes-storybook. Not great.

It seems like we had a lot of fonts issues that took forever to figure out until this year (10 min for AI to solve it). Like every other PR or browser update at Applitools would make all the fonts render differently, and we couldn't figure it out. It ended up being some `document.fonts.ready` promise I needed to wait on, but it took 4 years to figure it out.

Getting any sort of support was a lot of "you guys figure it out and run tests and come back to me." Meaning either your employees don't have enough to debug with or they're making me do all the work when I'm busy with other things. I wanna be able to say "VRTs are having issues running correctly because every approval updates the global baseline".

It shouldn't take AI 10 min to fix something that we've had as a HUGE problem for 4 years. This is INSANE. It's a basic feature of any VRT system, and your guys either did or didn't have it, but we never could get that answer even with your rep. We're paying for Enterprise and a rep, and still couldn't solve it. SERIOUSLY? A basic feature like "only lock approvals to the current branch?". It should be standard for any team working with VRTs. If I made the VRTs images stored in the repo, we would've never had that possibility.

We were also told to get some GitHub integration, but when we moved to our private GitHub Enterprise server, security nix'd that, and you guys had no other solution. My experience has been absolutely horrible!

Applitools has been a huge waste of my time, and the thing we seem to talk about the most. "Do we need Applitools?" (a real question that's come up multiple times), "Applitools is broken again", "I can't merge because Applitools is throwing up random errors, and we can't figure them out" for 4 years! Unacceptable. If I moved companies, this would be the first thing I changed.

On top of that, your docs suck. There's no professional way to say it except I can never seem to find the info I need. I've had to go to your eyes-storybook source code multiple times. Even AI struggled to find anything in the docs. I _also_ had it look at your source code. I need to be able to figure out things asap. I can't sit there and fumble around with your tech all day just because it's a 3rd party tool.

The screenshots are super small too. We're taking them at 1024x768 I believe, and that might be part of it, but there's no easy way to auto-zoom them. You can't even tell what's different without really zooming in.

And that brings me to another thing, the controls are super confusing. I can't easily figure out what they do. I know "show before" and "show after". What about "show side-by-side"? What about "hide magenta color". It's not easy. Takes me some time to find it. As a user, I'd expect to find that out just by looking. You might think this is nitpicking, but I've had this product for a long time, and I never seem to be able to remember how to do those simple things.

This one in particular might be my own fault based on a configuration. Each run shows its title as only a Git hash "3d29204e7c1b0513036cefd5baba2e64520017a7". I think I did that because we were getting conflicts years ago, but even still, it would be nice to group them by branch or at least show the branch info somewhere in that card. We're giving it to you, so I know you have it.

It's just one big list, but the Git hash is all I see. It means I have go into our in-house CI runner, scroll until I find the Applitools link, then go to it from there. I can't just go into the Applitools UI and easily know which run is the right one. I know you have filter controls on that left sidebar, but I don't wanna use those. It should be clear from looking at the feed which run is which. Right now, that left sidebar is completely useless.

I think the UI also seems very old school. I don't know how to explain it, but the design seems very busy and early-mid-2000s, not like modern designs.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It's supposed to solve the differences in our Storybook stories between PR changes. It does that somewhat with issues (as noted in other questions).

eyes-storybook is the one we use. One nice thing about it is it checks all our stories for us. We have something like 800 stories in the component library, so it's nice to be able to automate that.

What do you like best about the product?

Honestly, the visual diffs are the thing. They catch stuff my assertion tests never will — a button that shifted a few pixels, a broken font, two elements
overlapping — and one baseline covers a whole page, so I'm not babysitting a dozen brittle locators to catch the same problems. Day to day, the review flow is what I lean on: something changes, I see the before/after side by side, and I accept the new baseline in one click instead of digging through a trace trying to tell a real bug from an intended change. That's the other thing — when it fails, I'm looking at a picture, not a stack trace, so I usually know what broke in seconds. The Ultrafast Grid checking several browsers and viewports in one run saves me a pile of separate runs too. And it's flagged regressions our functional suite didn't even see.

What do you dislike about the product?

The false positives, mostly. Anti-aliasing, a bit of dynamic content, a one-pixel render shift between runs — any of it flags a "diff" that isn't a real change, and now I'm in the dashboard rubber-stamping it. That's the part that wears on me: every legit UI tweak means going back and re-approving baselines, and on a big suite that's a chunk of time nobody accounts for. It's also a paid service you don't control, so a slow dashboard or a network blip can redden CI for reasons that have zero to do with the app. And it can't run fully hands-off — an assertion just passes or fails, but a diff needs a person to actually look and decide, which is awkward in an unattended pipeline.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The core problem it solves: my functional tests are blind to how the page actually looks. Playwright will happily tell me a button exists and clicks — while the layout's collapsed, text is overlapping, or a CDN font never loaded. The page "passes" and still looks broken to a student. Applitools is the thing that catches that. For us that matters more than usual because it's an education product — students and teachers are in it every day, and a visually broken page is a bad day for a kid trying to do their work, not just a cosmetic nit. The business win is mostly speed and coverage: instead of someone manually clicking through pages across browsers before every release, one baseline run does it, so visual regressions get caught in CI instead of by a support ticket after we ship.