FAQ

Questions

Will simulated people show up in my analytics?

Not in Simulithic: sessions driven by our people are tagged synthetic at the source and excluded from segments, drop-offs and numbers. In your other tools, filter on navigator.webdriver or window.__SIMULITHIC_AGENT__, which every simulated browser sets.

Can they break something in production?

They are told never to delete, pay, cancel or sign out, destructive controls are never asked of them, and the explorer never submits a form. They will do what a flow asks with the test account you stored, which is why that account should be a dedicated one. For anything with side effects, point runs at staging.

How different is this from a Playwright test?

A spec presses the same buttons every time and passes or fails. A simulated person is given a task and a persona grounded in a real visitor and has to find the way, which is how it notices a button that works but is impossible to find, a flow that is fine on desktop and hopeless on a phone, or a page that loads and then confuses. We generate the specs too and run them first; the people are for what a spec can’t judge.

Where do the people run?

On Simulithic’s workers: real browsers in the cloud, real Android and iOS devices, and Mac machines for native apps. Nothing runs on your computer except the CLI and the explorer.

How do I run against localhost?

simulithic qa --port 3000 opens a temporary tunnel for the run and closes it when the run ends. It needscloudflared on your machine (brew install cloudflared; free, no Cloudflare account) orngrok; see CLI. The explorer needs no tunnel because it runs on your machine.

What does a run cost?

The Studio quotes every run before you press the button, and every finished run shows what it actually cost. Cancelled or errored sessions never count, and captured sessions are never metered. For plans, see Plans or write to team [at] simulithic [dot] com.

What happens to my data?

Masking happens in the visitor’s browser before anything is sent. What we keep, for how long, and how to have it deleted is in the privacy policy. Ask team [at] simulithic [dot] com for anything it doesn’t answer.