Introduction
Canva, the revolutionary online design platform, faced challenges maintaining the visual integrity of their rapidly growing application across browsers and devices. Manual testing was time-consuming, costly, and unsustainable at scale. By implementing Percy’s automated visual testing, integrated seamlessly with their CI/CD pipeline, Canva now detects visual changes instantly in pull requests. This has drastically reduced manual QA efforts, ensured cross-browser consistency, and empowered engineers to maintain a flawless UI with confidence—making every code change seamless and reliable.
The challenge
Manual visual testing was unsustainable
Canva was founded in 2012. Since then, it has grown rapidly to design and build a revolutionary online design and publishing platform. Their application empowers anyone and everyone “to design anything, and publish anywhere” and has taken the design and publishing industry by storm—making them one of just a few unicorns out of Australia.
Throughout Canva’s growth, their engineering teams have had to simultaneously optimize deployment efficiency while maintaining product quality. Test automation has been crucial to that balance, helping them write and deploy code that reliably functions as expected. Maintaining the visual integrity of their application, however, remained a manual and unsustainable task.
Canva knew that manually testing was not only expensive and time-consuming, but also would have failed to scale at the speed their team was growing. As they continued to build their core web application alongside their marketing website and mobile apps, it became increasingly difficult to foresee how each product update would visually impact their UI across browsers and screen widths.
