Highnam et al. present an open online platform to facilitate the testing and comparison of genome analysis methods using a standardized set of performance metrics and datasets. The platform hosts selected sets of raw sequence reads, which users can download for use in their own analysis pipelines and then return results for benchmarking. They currently offer an alignment test for short-read mappers and a variant calling test for single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) and indel variant callers. An initial benchmarking survey shows the continued improvement of short-read mapping algorithms in both alignment accuracy and the precision and sensitivity of variant calls. The genome comparison and analytic testing (GCAT) platform is freely accessible at http://www.bioplanet.com/gcat.