Rep vs Arcade: Screenshot Demos vs Live AI in 2026

Arcade is a great demo tool. And it won't close your deals.

That's not a criticism—it's a category distinction that most comparison posts miss entirely. The Arcade demo tool builds polished, quick demos from screenshots. Rep joins video calls and has actual conversations with your prospects. These aren't competitors. They're solving fundamentally different problems at different stages of your funnel.

I've spent years building sales automation products—first GoCustomer.ai, now Rep. The lesson that keeps repeating: the gap between "showing your product" and "selling your product" is where deals die. Screenshot demos handle the first job brilliantly. But someone still needs to handle the second.

Here's how to think about which you actually need.

What does the Arcade demo tool actually do?

Arcade is a screenshot-based interactive demo platform that lets marketing and product teams create self-guided product tours without engineering help. You install a Chrome extension, record clicks through your product, and Arcade stitches those screenshots into a clickable walkthrough with hotspots and AI-generated voiceovers.

The speed is genuinely impressive. According to Arcade's own benchmarks, the median time to publish a demo is 6 minutes. The top 1% of Arcade demos achieve 67% click-through rates. Companies like Zapier saw 70% more booked meetings after implementing Arcade demos, and Wrike reported 65% higher paid conversions in their onboarding flows.

The Data: Interactive demos drive 7.9x better website conversion (24.35% vs 3.05%) compared to pages without them, according to Storylane/Factors.ai research across 110,257 web sessions.

So what's the catch? Screenshot demos are pre-recorded. One-way. If a prospect asks "Can you show me how integrations work?"—they can't. They're stuck on the rails you built. And according to Navattic's 2025 research, the average session time on these demos is just 2.1 minutes. That's not deep exploration. That's a quick look.

Arcade excels at awareness. Getting someone interested. But it can't qualify, can't answer questions, can't handle objections. It's a marketing asset, not a sales conversation.

The buyer paradox Arcade can't solve

Here's where it gets interesting.

Gartner found that 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience. They want to research on their own terms. No awkward discovery calls. No scheduling friction. This is exactly what screenshot demos deliver.

But here's the other side: Gartner's 2025 B2B Buying Report also found that buyers who rely solely on digital self-service are 1.65x more likely to regret their purchase.

Read that again. They want self-service, but self-service alone leads to regret.

Why? Because static demos show features. They don't help buyers understand if those features solve their specific problem. They can't pivot when a prospect's question reveals a different use case. They can't say "Actually, based on what you just told me, let me show you this instead."

And by the time prospects reach your sales team—if they reach your sales team—6sense reports that 81% have already picked a winner. If your demo couldn't guide them to the right conclusion, you're already behind.

Key Insight: Buyers want autonomy without abandonment. They want to explore without pressure, but they still need guidance to avoid making the wrong choice. Screenshot demos deliver autonomy. They can't deliver guidance.

How Rep approaches this differently

When we built Rep, we made a deliberate technical choice: browser automation instead of screenshot capture.

Rep joins video meetings as an AI participant. It shares its screen and navigates your actual product in real-time—not screenshots, not recordings, the live application. When a prospect asks a question, Rep answers using your knowledge base. When they want to see a different feature, Rep navigates there.

Why we built Rep this way: At GoCustomer.ai, we learned that the gap between "seeing a demo" and "being sold to" is where most automation fails. Prospects don't just need to see your product—they need someone to connect what they're seeing to what they're trying to solve. We built Rep to close that gap without requiring a human on every call.

The difference isn't just technical. It's about what becomes possible:

Screenshot demos are a 24/7 marketing billboard. Rep is a 24/7 SDR who can actually hold a conversation.

The SE burnout problem screenshot demos don't fix

Here's a pain point I hear constantly from sales leaders: their SEs are drowning.

According to Presales Collective data, Sales Engineers are delivering 40% more demos year-over-year. And 30-50% of those demos go to unqualified prospects. That's your highest-paid technical sellers spending half their time on people who'll never buy.

Screenshot demos help with awareness—they might reduce some inbound requests from totally unqualified visitors. But they don't solve the core problem. Someone who requests a live demo still needs a live demo. Arcade can't take that meeting.

Rep can.

When a prospect clicks "Book a Demo," Rep joins instantly. No scheduling. No waiting. Rep qualifies while demonstrating, extracts pain points automatically, and routes qualified prospects to your human AEs with context already captured. Your SEs stop doing intro demos and start doing what they're actually good at: handling complex technical evaluations with prospects who are ready to buy.

The Data: AI agents can increase sales capacity by 3x without adding headcount, according to CogniAgent's 2025 analysis. That's not a future prediction—that's what teams using autonomous agents are seeing now.

When to use Arcade vs when to use Rep

This isn't either/or. It's about matching the tool to the job.

Use Arcade when:

• You need to increase website engagement fast (6-minute publish time)
• You're announcing a new feature and want a visual walkthrough
• Your product is simple enough that seeing is believing
• You want marketing assets for email campaigns, LinkedIn, changelogs
• Your ACV is low enough that human demos don't make economic sense

Use Rep when:

• Your SEs are burned out from repetitive intro demos
• You have a complex product that requires explanation and Q&A
• Prospects have technical questions your website can't answer
• You need 24/7 demo availability without hiring globally
• Your ACV justifies (and requires) real sales conversations
• You want to qualify before human AEs spend time

Use both when:

• Arcade sits on your website catching top-of-funnel interest
• Rep handles inbound demo requests with live conversations
• Qualified prospects get routed to human AEs with full context

My recommendation: If you're choosing one to start, choose based on your primary pain. Low website conversion? Start with Arcade. SE burnout and unqualified demo requests? Start with Rep. But if you're building a stack that'll still work in 2028, plan for both. And honestly? My bet is that teams who delay on the live AI piece will find themselves scrambling to catch up.

The 2028 reality you should be planning for

Gartner's October 2025 predictions include a number that should shape your thinking: by 2028, 90% of B2B buying will be intermediated by AI agents, representing over $15 trillion in spend.

That's not a gentle shift. That's a complete restructuring of how B2B purchasing works.

Screenshot demos were revolutionary in 2020. They're table stakes in 2026. But the next wave isn't better screenshots. It's autonomous agents that can actually sell—qualify prospects, answer questions, handle objections, and book next steps.

Teams building their demo infrastructure today have a choice: optimize for the present (screenshot demos are safer, proven, easier) or position for where the market is heading (agentic AI is newer, requires more setup, but represents the future).

I'm obviously biased here—I'm building Rep. But I'd encourage you to look at the Gartner data yourself. The shift toward AI-mediated buying isn't a vendor prediction. It's independent research pointing to a fundamental change in how B2B works.

The demo tool market has split into two clear categories: tools that show your product (Arcade and its competitors) and tools that sell it (Rep and other AI agents). Both have a place in a modern go-to-market stack.

Arcade will make your website convert better. That's proven, measurable, and achievable in 6 minutes. But when a prospect wants a real conversation—wants to ask questions, explore their specific use case, understand if your product actually fits—Arcade can't help. Rep can.

The question isn't which is better. It's whether you're building for 2024 or 2028. See how Rep handles live demos—and decide where it fits in your stack.