How-to
3 min read

How Comments Work on Preview Deployments

Learn when and where Comments are available, and how to enable and disable Comments at the account, project, and session or interface levels.
Table of Contents

Pull request owners receive emails whenever a new comment is created. Comment creators and participators in comment threads will receive email notifications alerting them to new activity within those threads. Anyone in your Vercel Team can leave comments on your previews by default. On Pro and Enterprise Vercel plans you can enable comments from Vercel accounts outside of your teams as well.

When changes are pushed to a PR, and a new preview deployment has been generated, a popup modal in the bottom-right corner will prompt you to refresh your view.

The popup modal that alerts you when you are viewing an outdated deployment.The popup modal that alerts you when you are viewing an outdated deployment.
The popup modal that alerts you when you are viewing an outdated deployment.

Comments are visible over your project's UI at the preview deployment URL.

When you open a preview deployment with comments enabled, there will be a toolbar near the bottom of your browser that will prompt you to log into your Vercel account to leave a comment. You can drag this toolbar anywhere.

The comments toolbar in a preview deployment.

After successfully logging in, the toolbar will display buttons allowing one to:

Comments on each page are represented by the author's Vercel profile picture, allowing you to see at a glance which team members and participants have left feedback.

Anyone who has ever viewed your preview while logged into comments will appear as a profile picture on the menu bar.

Comments are enabled by default for all preview deployments on all new projects. By default, only members of your Vercel team can contribute comments.

You can enable or disable comments at the account level with certain permissions:

  1. Navigate to your Vercel dashboard
  2. Make sure that you have selected the Hobby account or team in question
  3. In the account Settings tab, select On or Off in the dropdown menu under the Comments section
The dashboard setting to enable or disable comments at the account level.The dashboard setting to enable or disable comments at the account level.
The dashboard setting to enable or disable comments at the account level.

If comments are disabled for one of your projects, you can enable them from your Vercel dashboard:

  1. Go to your project Settings tab
  2. Select On from the dropdown menu under the Preview Comments section
The dashboard setting to enable or disable comments in a project.The dashboard setting to enable or disable comments in a project.
The dashboard setting to enable or disable comments in a project.

Comments will be enabled for Projects that used the Default (off) setting during the comments public beta. This is because the default setting will be changed from Default (off) to Default (on). To disable comments, select the Off setting.

You can also disable comments for the current browser session at any time by selecting Disable for Session. To show the comments again, open a new browser session. This can be useful for performance testing or debugging.

You can show or hide the comments interface by using ⌘ + . on MacOS (Ctrl + . on Windows). This can be useful if the interface is getting in the way of your review and you need to hide it momentarily.

You can also enable or disable comments with preview environment variables.

To use comments in a production deployment, or link comments in your local development environment to a preview deployment, see our docs on using comments in production and localhost.

To learn how to share deployments with comments enabled, see the Sharing Deployments docs.

Last updated on March 29, 2024