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What is the difference between a ‘Test’ and a ‘Snapshot’?

A test is the expression of a piece of UI in a specific state. Chromatic uses tests to verify visual appearance and UI functionality. By default, Chromatic uses your Storybook stories as tests. If you’re integrating Playwright or Cypress, Chromatic reuses your existing E2E tests for visual verification.

A snapshot is an image of a test that is captured by our Capture Cloud infrastructure. A test can have multiple snapshots for dimensions like browsers, themes, and viewports.

Snapshots vs TurboSnaps

TurboSnaps are snapshots we’ve copied over from existing baselines that have no code changes. Since TurboSnaps require fewer resouces, we bill them at 1/5th of the cost of a regular snapshot.

If you’ve enabled TurboSnap, each build will show a count of snapshots and TurboSnaps used.

The scenario below shows how billable snapshots are calculated when your tests run across multiple browsers and include TurboSnaps and regular snapshots.