Record and Playback Testing in 2026

Anushree Chatterjee

“I see no reason for recording the obvious” – Edward Weston.

This quote is about photography, but when discussing record and playback tools, we do not even want to miss a single click. Record and playback testing has been around for a long time and, along the way, has established its own niche and reputation among software teams who have been using it over the years. However, the record and playback market has changed significantly in recent years, leading many teams to take a fresh look at it.

Since you may be wondering whether or not this form of testing has finally evolved to the point where it makes sense for your team to adopt it, we’ve prepared a quick overview to get you up to speed on the current state of the record and playback testing in 2026.

What is Record and Playback Testing?

Recording and playing back tests means automating tests by capturing how someone uses an app’s interface, and later running those actions again automatically. Traditional tools save each tap, key press, or move through screens just as they happened, creating code meant to copy real usage.

This approach did cut down on code at first, yet tied tests closely to how the UI was built – so they broke easily, were hard to update, and also didn’t work well when apps changed fast.

The person using the testing tool will start recording, then perform some interactions with the software, and then stop the recording. In between starting and stopping the recording, the testing tool will attempt to log each interaction performed and save it as a series of interactions to be repeated later. Some software testing tools can also provide a log of how the software application is behaving as the actions are being performed during this process.

Advantages of Record and Playback Testing

What is the main appeal of recording and playing back tests? It’s fast. You create tests quickly – no coding needed. Which means even beginners can handle basic tasks without much hassle. That speed is why these tools caught on, especially when teams were rushing to prove things worked.

Still, such benefits usually only show up in quick tests or basic setups. Once apps get more complex, they tend to fade away.

• Easy Test Creation: Allows testers, including non-programmers, to create automated tests easily by recording their actions instead of writing code.
• Quick Automation: It helps in faster test automation and is particularly useful for regression testing, where repetitive tasks are automated.
• Reduced Manual Effort: When compared to manually testing all the repetitive tasks repeatedly, record and playback tools help reduce effort.
• Enhanced Accuracy Over Manual Testing: There could be misses and errors during manual testing, which are bypassed with record and playback tools.
• Faster Feedback: Automated tests can be run more frequently, providing quicker feedback to developers about the impact of their changes as compared to manual testing.

Why Traditional Record and Playback Fails in Modern Applications

In the early days of the web, websites were like digital brochures: static, predictable, and simple. Back then, record and playback was the “magic wand” of testing. You’d hit record, click a few buttons, and the tool would memorize your path like a GPS.

But today’s web applications aren’t brochures; they are complex, living machines. If you try to use that same old GPS in a city where the roads change every hour, you’re going to get lost.

• Dynamic UI Elements: Modern websites are often built using frameworks (like React or Angular) that generate code on the fly. For example, a “Submit” button had a fixed name, like id="submit-button". The recorder remembered that name forever. But now, to keep things fast and secure, the computer might name that button id="btn-9x2p" today and id="btn-4z8q" tomorrow. When the playback tool looks for btn-9x2p and doesn’t find it, the test breaks, even though the button is sitting right there.
• Asynchronous Nature of Elements: Modern apps are asynchronous, meaning different parts of the page load at different speeds. A “Buy Now” button might appear only after a price is fetched from a server across the ocean. If the internet lags by just half a second and the button isn’t there yet, the recorder “clicks” the empty air and reports a failure.
• Constantly Changing UIs: Modern apps update constantly. Developers might move the “Login” button from the top right to a sidebar. In traditional record and playback, if you have 50 different tests that all start with “Login,” and that button moves, all 50 tests break at once. You end up spending more time “re-recording” old tests than actually building new features.
• Multiple User Flows: Modern user journeys are rarely a straight line. Users might toggle dark mode, use a mobile device, or have a slow 3G connection. Record and playback only know the one path you showed them. It can’t handle “If/Then” logic (e.g., “If a pop-up appears, close it; otherwise, keep going”).

Where is Record and Playback Testing Today?

Record and playback testing has taken great strides in recent history to overcome many of the challenges that plagued it in the past. An example of a record and playback tool is Selenium IDE, which is open-source, supports multiple browsers, and is easy to use. However, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages.

Limitations of Traditional Record and Playback Testing

Many software professionals significantly consider the downsides of record and playback testing and do not want to use them. Here are a few of them:

• Limited Functionality: The main issues are typically related to the limited core functionality. Some older tools did not allow for editing recorded test cases, and essential features such as assertions are not supported. Even some basic expectations around everyday user actions like recording menu selections, hovering, and drag-and-drop actions are often unsupported and result in errors.
• UI Code Dependency: Tests created with traditional record and playback tools like Selenium IDE heavily rely on the application’s UI code, making them sensitive to changes and potentially leading to frequent test failures even with minor UI updates.
• Programmers Needed: The other major downside of such recorded tests is often the complexity of cleaning/modifying the recorded tests. The main idea behind using these recorders in the first place is that anyone without programming experience can “create” an automated test, right? As it turns out, you would typically still need a programmer for the next steps.
• Maintenance is Time-consuming: The first step is to clean up the test steps (since recorders tend to add a lot of churn and unnecessary steps, making the test brittle and lengthy to execute). Then, the next step is to add the assertions. Doing so outpaces the benefits of using such a tool since it would often take less time to write the same automated test from scratch.
• Costly in Terms of Effort: What if no QA engineers on the team who can code? It would be costly to maintain such recorded tests since they do not automatically adapt to changes in the application. Even minor changes in the software project can throw off automated tests created in this manner. And since it’s not feasible to modify the test, you would need to create it again from scratch, which would be a nightmare for any rapidly changing software project.
• Difficult Integrations: Record and playback testing has also suffered from a handful of other criticisms, like a lack of support for integrations. Another is needing to switch tools and context to review testing results. Also, there is a lack of information provided for troubleshooting issues with tests.

How AI Modernizes Record and Playback Testing

Modern UI Recording Is Not Just Recording Clicks

Currently, UI recording isn’t just about logging basic clicks or scrolls. Current screen capture tech focuses more on intent. What users meant to do instead of each exact move they made. This change shows how low-code tools are moving. Less reliant on fragile code, instead using smart tests that stick around even when the interface gets tweaked.

How AI Levels the Field

AI adds value to traditional record and playback testing by:

• Intelligent UI Element Locators: Traditional tools fail because they look for a specific ID number (the “Fixed Address”). If the developer changes that ID, the tool gets lost. AI uses multi-attribute recognition. It doesn’t just look at the ID; it takes other aspects of the button into account as well. For example, it notes the text, the color, the shape, and its position relative to other things (e.g., “The blue button next to the ‘Cancel’ link”).
• Self-healing of Tests: Fragile tests were a known issue with record and playback. A broken test meant a human had to stop everything, find the error, and re-record the step. With AI, a change in one of the aspects of the UI element, like the color, will not break the test. Instead, it compares the other aspects, and if they still match, then it makes the updates in the script. This helps cut down test maintenance time drastically.
• Recording Tests in Natural Language: With modern, AI-based tools like testRigor, you can record your test in natural language instead of complex lines of code. This “levels the field” because anyone—a product manager, a manual tester, or a business owner—can read, edit, and verify the tests without knowing a single line of code.
• Visual Testing Ability: A traditional script might pass even if the website looks like a total mess (e.g., the text is overlapping, or the image is broken), as long as the button technically exists in the code. AI uses Computer Vision to literally look at the screen. It can detect if a layout is shifted, if a pop-up is blocking a form, or if the brand colors are slightly off.

Here’s a summary of how modern AI-based testing fares in comparison to traditional record and playback testing.

Modern Record and Playback Automation Tools

“Codeless” or “No-code” tools are big nowadays, and many teams strive to try them out. Unfortunately, some so-called codeless testing tools are essentially just evolved record and playback tools – much improved in this regard, but still missing the key features. Another less common type of codeless tool is when a regular user (non-programmer) can create, edit, and maintain any test completely by themself. Read: Why No-Code / Low-Code Test Automation Tools Don’t Work

Having said that, the capability alone to record a test execution and then use it as a test case is quite helpful for the non-pros, right? Just imagine how easy it would be for a business analyst to just document a user journey using a test automation tool and – voila! You have a test case that developers and testers couldn’t have dreamed of.

Record and Playback (and more) with testRigor

testRigor ditches traditional recording, using smart tech to build clear tests anyone can understand. Rather than tracking precise clicks or elements, it turns actions into simple steps described in everyday language.

This tool uses smart locators that fix themselves, so tests keep working even when the interface changes. Because of this, teams can build automated checks fast – no coding needed – while still handling tough situations reliably.

Let’s look at the example of testRigor to understand better. There is a testRigor recorder, which you can use to record any test, just like with any similar tool. What happens next, however, is quite different. The generative AI-based algorithms behind the scenes capture your test steps as simple English statements. This is applicable even to UI elements like buttons and form fields – no more XPaths or CSS errors!

enter "Kindle" into "Search"
enter enter
click "Kindle Scribe"
click "Add To Cart"
check that page contains "Item Added To Cart"

What this means for the user is that these pre-recorded steps look just like a well-written manual test case, except it’s an automated test that can be run thousands of times, saving countless hours. It can be expanded and modified easily. Maintenance will take almost no time since multiple built-in mechanisms, such as self-healing, simplify the process. Here’s a detailed guide showing just that – How to use testRigor’s test recorder for record and playback testing?

There are many additional out-of-the-box advantages, such as

• Reusable Rules (Subroutines): You can easily create functions for the test steps that you use repeatedly. You can use the Reusable Rules to create such functions and call them in test cases by simply writing their names. See the example of Reusable Rules.
• Global Variables and Data Sets: You can import data from external files or create your own global variables and data sets in testRigor to use them in data-driven testing.
• 2FA, QR Code, and Captcha Resolution: testRigor easily manages the 2FA, QR Code, and Captcha resolution through its simple English commands.
• Email, Phone Call, and SMS Testing: Use simple English commands to test the email, phone calls, and SMS. These commands are useful for validating 2FA scenarios, with OTPs and authentication codes being sent to email, phone calls, or via phone text.
• File Upload/ Download Testing: Execute the test steps involving file download or file upload without the requirement of any third-party software. You can also validate the contents of the files using testRigor’s simple English commands.
• Visual Testing: testRigor tests your UI like a human tester would and can catch UI changes with ease. Read: How to do visual testing using testRigor?
• Adapts to UI and Requirement Changes: If there is any change in the functionality, testRigor can perform AI-based self-healing so that the test scripts will also be automatically updated.
• Stable Integrations: testRigor offers wide support for integrations with CI/CD and test management tools
• Script Easily: You can use advanced script-like testing features that don’t require writing code.
• Negligible Test Maintenance: This tool guarantees the bare minimum of test maintenance efforts. This is because testRigor does not rely on the implementation details of UI elements to interact with them. This sets it apart from the rest. Read more about it over here – Decrease Test Maintenance Time by 99.5% with testRigor

Prevent missed or inaccurate UI actions such as menu selections, hover states, and drag-and-drop actions. Read about the top features of testRigor.

Conclusion

Record and playback testing brought automation to lots of teams, yet its downsides show up fast. Brittle scripts break often, errors pop up daily, while upkeep gets pricier over time, so old-school tools just don’t fit today’s apps. But if you opt for smart tools like testRigor that use modern technology like AI, you’re likely to make the most of record and playback testing while benefiting from other effective features.

“We spent so much time on maintenance when using Selenium, and we spend nearly zero time with maintenance using testRigor.”

Keith Powe VP Of Engineering - IDT