How Touca is different from visual regression testing tools?

[ghorbanzade]

This Q/A is inspired by a conversation with @ryoia on Touca Community on Discord.

[ghorbanzade]

Tools like Cypress, Percy, QA Rainforest, Reflect, Applitools, all do "Visual Regression Testing" which requires a web interface. Some of these tools need that interface to be publicly accessible so they are post-deployment. Some work with ephemeral environments spawned for feature branches as part of the CI pipeline.

We differentiate ourselves in three ways:

• We are primarily focused on effectively testing software workflows without a web-interface: from machine learning algorithms to computer vision systems, to back-end REST APIs, to command-line tools. You name it.
• We are not necessarily end-to-end. You can use Touca to test virtually any sub-system of the software for an arbitrarily large number of inputs. In fact, touca.check can be used in production code too. It just wouldn't do anything in production environments.
• We want to be developer-friendly and optimize our product for use in the development stage (pre-deployment). Ideally, we want engineers to use Touca for dev-testing local code changes, and provide feedback as they write code. But we're not there yet. Most users push code changes to a feature branch and let their CI run Touca tests.