About BlinkBench
Know what you measured.
Take a reaction time test online and you get a number and a percentile: you were faster than 63% of people. Nice. But which people? Measured on what hardware, in what sample, filtered how? Nobody says. And here's the question underneath that one: how much of your result was even you, rather than the gap between the screen changing, your browser noticing, and your keyboard getting round to mentioning it?
That second question has a real answer, and it's bigger than people expect. A 60Hz screen can only change every 16.7 milliseconds. So the thing you reacted to may have been sitting there, ready, for most of a frame before your eyes had any chance of seeing it. Add your mouse, your operating system, and the browser's own timing on top, and a real slice of any fast reaction time belongs to the equipment rather than the person holding it.
Eric built BlinkBench because none of the sites handing out percentiles were willing to mention any of this. The tests here are the same tests. The difference is that this one shows its working.
Eric builds free, single-purpose measurement tools — a small network of sites that all share one rule: a number has to be defensible before it ships. BlinkBench points that rule at a corner of the web where it mostly doesn't apply, full of tests that score you against samples they never describe. He's not a psychologist, and this site doesn't diagnose anything or rank you against a crowd it can't document. It measures carefully, then tells you what the measurement is actually worth.
Part of the Veraino network of free websites.
How it works
Most sites that show their working are showing you a formula. A test isn't a formula. It's a reading off an instrument, and the instrument here is your browser, your mouse, and your screen. We don't own any of those. So showing our working means four things instead, on every single test.
- Your real number comes first. What you actually scored, in the unit we measured it in, before anyone starts interpreting it for you.
- We tell you what your gear contributed. Your screen can only refresh so often, which decides when a stimulus can appear at all. Your mouse and your browser pile on more. Over a measurement this short that isn't a rounding error, so we put a number on it instead of quietly folding it into your score.
- No percentile we can't back up. If real research has measured a comparable task, we cite it and sit the range next to your result. If it hasn't, you get nothing — not a number we made up, and not one calculated from this site's own visitors, who we know nothing about.
- We never claim the score is just you. A reaction time measured through a browser is a fact about a person and a machine. We're not going to pretend otherwise, and we're certainly not going to sell you something to fix it.
Our commitments
- Free, and no sign-up. Every test here is free. No account, no subscription, no paywall, no email address.
- Your scores stay on your machine. We don't save results, we don't build a leaderboard out of them, and there's no account to make. Nothing you do here becomes a row in a table we own.
- Honest about the limits. Where the equipment or the method caps what we can measure, we say so right on the page rather than hiding it in a footnote. These tests measure things. They don't assess you, diagnose you, or predict anything about you.
- Kept current. Every research range we cite carries a “last reviewed” date, and we re-check it against the source on a schedule. That's an ongoing job, not a one-time build.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, or suggestions: hello@blinkbench.com. Eric reads every message personally.