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tl;dr: Invitations are for candidates and cost credits. Preview is for you and your team members, and it is free.
Once you create an assessment, you will probably want to check that it works the way you expect. There are two ways to test it: Preview the assessment, or Invite yourself or a teammate as if you were a candidate. If you only want to see how the assessment flows, always use Preview. It costs nothing, and you can run it any number of times.

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What Previews Are For

Preview lets you or anyone on your team walk through the assessment without spending credits. You can preview an assessment as many times as you like. Previews come in two modes: Use the recruiter mode for a quick sanity check of your tests and settings. Use the candidate mode when you want to experience the proctoring prompts and the flow exactly as a candidate would.
Previews show sample questions for quizzes built from Equip’s question bank. The samples are representative and matched by difficulty, but the actual quiz questions are never shown to recruiters, which protects the question bank. If the sample bank has fewer questions than you configured, the preview shows fewer, while candidates still see the full count.Custom content and Equip’s non-quiz tests appear in previews exactly as candidates see them. See Why can’t I see quiz questions? for details.

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What Invitations Are For

Invitations are the real thing. When you invite yourself or a teammate, the invitee goes through the full candidate experience: the actual questions are shown, proctoring is enabled, and the attempt produces a real result with scores and a proctoring report.
1

Open the invite page

Click Invite under the assessment on your dashboard.
2

Send the invitation

On the Send Invitations tab, enter your own or your teammate’s email address and send. Equip confirms how many credits will be deducted before you send. See Email Invitations for all the sending options.
3

Attempt the assessment

Open the unique link from the invitation email and complete the assessment exactly as a candidate would.
Inviting yourself is useful when you need to verify end-to-end behavior: real questions, actual proctoring evidence, grading, and the final report. For everything else, Preview is enough.
Invitations cost credits, even when the invitee is you or a team member. If you only need to check the flow or the questions, use Preview instead.

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Credit Differences

Here is how the two options compare:
If you invited yourself just to test and never started the assessment, you can reclaim the credit once 24 hours have passed since the invitation. See How Credits Work for the full policy.