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Malleon – turn real user sessions into automated tests

Malleon – turn real user sessions into automated tests

by godelshalt·Mar 8, 2026·4 points·0 comments
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AI Analysis

●●SolidSolve My ProblemShip It

Session replay to test converter, but Replay.io and LogRocket already pivot toward this.

Strengths
  • •Deterministic replay reconstruction of browser interactions eliminates video-playback brittleness.
  • •Closes the gap between production debugging and regression test creation—a real workflow pain.
  • •Free tier removes friction for initial adoption and side-project use.
Weaknesses
  • •Session replay + testing is an active category (Replay.io, LogRocket, Chromatic); unclear differentiation beyond 'faster conversion'.
  • •No evidence of scale—cloud infrastructure requirements and pricing strategy unaddressed.
Target Audience

QA engineers, full-stack developers, product teams running web applications

Similar To

Replay.io · LogRocket · Chromatic

Post Description

Hey HN,

I've been building a tool called Malleon because I got tired of e2e tests that don't reflect what users actually do. And I have long been obsessed with using real user sessions for load testing. Having worked with tools like Tsung and Gatling for load testing, I often wished I could just replay yesterday's traffic x2 or x5 instead of using synthetic sessions. Malleon started as an attempt to bridge those two worlds.

The basic idea is: instead of writing tests from scratch, record real user sessions and turn them into replayable tests.

The SDK records things like: - DOM interactions - network requests - console output - timing between actions

The replay isn't a video. It reconstructs and replays the actual browser interactions against your app.

So a real user session becomes a reproducible test case.

Typical flow looks like: - drop a small JS SDK into your app - users interact with the site normally - sessions get recorded - you browse replays and find something interesting (bug, error, weird behavior) - turn that session into a test and run it in CI

The test runner is self-hosted. You pull the Docker image and run it wherever you want. It drives a browser (headless or headful) and replays the interaction sequence.

Some things that turned out to be surprisingly tricky while building this: - replaying interactions when the DOM has changed since recording - handling viewport/layout differences - making network replay transparent to the app - keeping timing realistic without making tests slow

The system also collects logs, errors, and request timings so sessions are searchable and you can track network performance, see p90/p95/p99 stats, all that good stuff.

Links: - Malleon: https://malleon.io - Replay SDK: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@malleon/replay - Replay CLI: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@malleon/replay-cli - Docs: https://github.com/malleonio/malleon-documentation

Free tier available.

Curious if anyone else has run into the "our tests don't reflect what users actually do (or how they scale)" problem.

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