Functionize Studio is an independent testing agent for your web application. You describe what should be true in plain language; Studio builds the test, runs it in a real browser, tells you what happened, and keeps it working as your application changes.
If you only take one sentence from this page: you set what good looks like, and Studio does the testing.
The problem it exists to solve
Code is now written faster than anyone can check it. Coding agents produce working-looking changes in minutes, and the bottleneck moves from writing software to being confident it still does what you promised.
Traditional automation does not scale into that gap. Selector-based tests break whenever the page moves, so teams spend their time repairing tests rather than finding defects, and a suite nobody trusts quietly stops being read.
Studio's answer is a second agent — one that answers to you rather than to the code, and whose job is to prove your intent still holds on every release.
What makes it different from a chatbot with a browser
Three things, and they are worth understanding before you start.
1. It finds elements the way a person does
Studio identifies what to click visually, contextually and structurally — not by CSS selector or
XPath. So when a button moves, gets restyled or is renamed, the test usually keeps working, because
what you asked for was "add the item to the basket", not "click div.btn-primary:nth-child(3)".
This is why you describe what a user does rather than how the page is built. It is the single biggest habit change for people arriving from selector-based tools.
2. Reasoning where reasoning helps, determinism where it must be exact
A test that reasons about everything is unpredictable; one that reasons about nothing is brittle. Studio uses judgement to locate and adapt, and exact comparison to assert. When it checks a price is $966.00, that is a deterministic comparison — it does not "think" the price looks about right.
You can see both halves in a run: the action reads as a description of the target, while the verification records an operator, an expected value and the value actually found.
3. It tells you when it is unsure, and stops when the answer is yours
Studio shows you its plan before it builds, narrates what it is doing, and flags contradictions rather than guessing. When a test fails because your expectation and the application genuinely disagree, it will say so and ask — instead of quietly rewriting the assertion to make the failure go away.
That restraint is the difference between a suite you can trust and a green dashboard that means nothing. It is worked through in detail in Diagnosing a Failed Test.
What you can ask it to do
| Create tests | Describe an outcome; Studio turns it into steps, checks them against the live page, and shows you the plan before committing. |
| Run them | On our infrastructure, in a real browser, on isolated machines. Nothing to install and nothing to maintain. |
| Diagnose failures | Every step keeps a screenshot, the values it read, and a comparison against the last successful run. |
| Maintain tests | Ask for a change in plain language. Studio also repairs drift on its own, within limits you control. |
| Group and schedule | Combine tests into orchestrations that run as one job, on demand or on a schedule. |
| Work from your own tools | Connect over MCP and drive all of the above from Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code and others. |
How the pieces fit together
- Project — a container for related tests, holding the settings they inherit.
- Test — your instructions, the steps generated from them, and the history of every run and change.
- Session — the conversation with the agent that created or changed a test. Sessions are kept, so the reasoning behind a step survives.
- Orchestration — a named group of tests run together as one job.
- Workflow — a scheduled job written in plain language, for recurring browser work that is not a pass/fail test.
- Skill — a briefing about your application that makes everything above sharper.
Built for real enterprise applications
Studio ships with contextual knowledge of the systems large organizations actually run — Salesforce, SAP, Workday, ServiceNow, Microsoft 365 — and skills can be built for bespoke in-house applications too. See Functionize Skills.
Tests execute on isolated virtual machines and the platform scales to run thousands in parallel on enterprise plans. For applications that are not reachable from the public internet, see the Non-Public Application Testing section.
Who uses it, and for what
- Testers describe what to test and get a suite that stays green, without writing or repairing selector code.
- Developers get a second opinion on what their coding agent just built, driven from the editor they already work in.
- Engineering leaders get coverage that grows with the product rather than decaying behind it.
Where to go next
- Your First Test in Functionize Studio — the whole loop in pictures, about ten minutes.
- The exercise series — seven self-paced exercises against a demo store, each with a printable lab handout.
- The index — everything we have written, on one page.
You do not need to install anything or write any code to follow any of it.