Applitools Alternatives (2026): 8 Tools Compared on Price
Applitools is a capable visual testing platform, and for a large QA team that needs its breadth it can be the right choice. This page is for teams weighing it against something else, usually for one of these reasons: the $667 a month entry price, the sales call that every plan above Starter requires, the SDK that has to live in a test suite, or needing little more than page screenshots compared between environments.
Which of those is driving you decides which tool to look at, so this page is organised that way. Every price below is from the vendor’s own pricing page, checked on 19 October 2026.
What Applitools costs today
| Plan | Price | What’s included |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $667/month, paid annually | 1,000 page checkpoints or 100,000 component checkpoints, unlimited users |
| Professional | Contact sales | Starts at 150 active pages / 1,500 components |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Starts at 350 active pages / 1,500 components |
There is a free trial, but no free plan, and the pricing page shows no month-to-month option for Starter.
Applitools sells two products, Eyes and Autonomous. This page is about Eyes, the visual testing product, which you call from your tests through an SDK.
Starter is more than visual testing. It also includes accessibility testing, Storybook component testing, a Figma integration, CI/CD integrations, automated maintenance and root-cause analysis, and a Visual AI MCP server. If you use those, the price buys more than screenshots.
Two things the pricing page doesn’t explain: how checkpoints are counted across the browsers and viewports you test, and what happens when you go over your allowance. Ask about both before you size a plan, because a page tested at several widths in several browsers can use up 1,000 page checkpoints quickly.
The part most teams react to is the jump. Starter is the only published price. Anything bigger is a conversation with sales, priced in “active pages” rather than a monthly number you can calculate yourself.
Which alternative, depending on why you are leaving
| If you are leaving because… | Look at |
|---|---|
| $667/month is too much for the volume you use | Diffy, Argos, Percy |
| You want a free tier, not a trial | Percy, Argos, Chromatic, Diffy |
| You don’t have a test suite and don’t want to write one | Diffy, BackstopJS |
| Your UI is components in Storybook | Chromatic |
| You already run Playwright and want zero cost | Playwright’s toHaveScreenshot() |
| You still need a large browser and device grid | Percy, Sauce Labs, TestMu AI SmartUI |
| Non-developers have to review the results | Diffy |
Diffy
Diffy is ours. It is URL-based: you paste URLs or import a sitemap, pick breakpoints, and compare two environments, or the same site before and after a change. There is no SDK, no test code and nothing installed on the site. That’s the main structural difference from Applitools, where the visual check lives inside a test.
- Free: 500 screenshots a month, production and staging environments, screenshot modification settings, one month of history.
- Paid: from $67/month billed annually ($80 monthly) for 2,000 screenshots, adding CI and API access and six months of history. Then $125/month for 8,000 and $250/month for 30,000, billed annually. Every tier is self-serve. See pricing.
- Counting: one page at one breakpoint is one screenshot.
- Browsers: Chromium and WebKit, widths from 240px to 2000px.
Where it beats Applitools: price, published self-serve plans, and not needing a test suite. A 20-page site at three breakpoints, checked daily, is about 1,800 screenshots a month: $67 a month, billed annually, on Diffy’s 2,000-screenshot plan.
Where it does not: fewer browsers (no Firefox or Edge), it compares pages by URL rather than individual components, and there is no functional or accessibility testing in the same product.
Full head-to-head: Diffy vs Applitools
Percy
The most direct swap if you want to keep the same shape: an SDK in your tests, rendering in the vendor’s cloud, several browsers. Percy is part of BrowserStack. The SDK captures a DOM snapshot in your test run and Percy renders it on its own infrastructure, much like Applitools’ Ultrafast Grid.
Free is 5,000 screenshots a month. Desktop is $199/month paid annually for 10,000 screenshots, with extra screenshots at $0.036. Desktop & Mobile is $599/month paid annually for 25,000, at $0.048 for extras. Every plan has unlimited users.
Percy counts one page or component in one browser at one width as one screenshot, so browsers and widths multiply.
Where it beats Applitools: a real free tier, published prices for the paid plans, and a lower entry point.
Where it does not: it still runs from your tests or a snapshot command in CI, and its plans don’t include functional or accessibility testing, which BrowserStack sells as separate products.
Percy alternatives · Diffy vs Percy
Argos
The lowest published price per extra screenshot of the hosted tools here. Argos is MIT-licensed, open-source code run as a hosted service. You upload screenshots from Playwright, Cypress, Storybook, Vitest, Puppeteer, WebdriverIO or any other pipeline that produces them, and review them on the pull request.
The Hobby plan is free for up to 5,000 screenshots. Pro starts at $100/month, billed monthly, with 35,000 screenshots included and $0.004 for each extra one.
Argos describes its comparison as deterministic pixel diffing, not AI.
Where it beats Applitools: price, by a wide margin, and month-to-month billing.
Where it does not: you bring the screenshots, from your tests or another pipeline, and there is no AI layer deciding what counts as a change. You tune the noise out yourself.
Chromatic
If you used Applitools for a component library, Chromatic is the natural home. It is made by the team behind Storybook, and it also builds on Playwright, Cypress and Vitest tests.
Free is 5,000 snapshots a month on Chrome only. Starter is $179/month for 35,000 snapshots across Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge, with extra snapshots at $0.008. Pro is $399/month for 85,000.
Where it beats Applitools: published prices for every plan below Enterprise, and a free tier.
Where it does not: it works from your stories and tests, not from a list of URLs, and the free tier is Chrome-only.
Full head-to-head: Diffy vs Chromatic
Playwright’s built-in screenshot assertions
If you already run Playwright, you already have visual testing at no cost: await expect(page).toHaveScreenshot().
It masks elements by locator, disables animations by default, and lets you tune sensitivity with threshold, maxDiffPixels and maxDiffPixelRatio. The catch is environment discipline. Rendering varies by operating system and browser version, which is why Playwright names baselines per browser and platform. A baseline captured on a Mac isn’t used by a Linux CI run.
Where it beats Applitools: unlimited screenshots, no vendor, nothing to buy.
Where it does not: baselines live in your repository, review is a local HTML report, and comparison is pixel-based. Expect to spend time on thresholds that Applitools’ match levels handle for you.
Full head-to-head: Diffy vs Playwright
BackstopJS
The open-source option that needs no test suite. You list URLs and scenarios in backstop.json, then run backstop test and backstop approve. It’s MIT licensed, and it has the settings a real site needs: hiding and removing selectors, delays, and scripts that run before capture.
Check its maintenance before adopting it. The latest version on npm is still 6.3.25, published on 7 September 2024.
Where it beats Applitools: free, unlimited and URL-based.
Where it does not: you own the maintenance, the baselines and the CI setup.
Full head-to-head: Diffy vs BackstopJS
Sauce Labs Visual and TestMu AI SmartUI
Both put visual testing inside a browser and real-device grid, which makes sense if you need the grid anyway.
Sauce Labs Visual: the cheapest plans that include visual testing are Virtual Device Cloud at $149/month billed annually ($199 month to month) and Real Device Cloud at $199/month billed annually ($249 month to month). Both include 500 visual snapshots a month, and the page doesn’t list a price for extra snapshots.
TestMu AI SmartUI (formerly LambdaTest): the free tier is 2,000 screenshots for the lifetime of the account, not per month. SmartUI Visual Regression is listed from $199/month billed annually.
Where they beat Applitools: published entry prices, and a browser and device cloud in the same subscription (real devices on Sauce Labs’ Real Device Cloud plan).
Where they do not: visual testing is a feature of a bigger product, and Sauce Labs’ 500 snapshots a month is a small allowance for the price.
What you give up by leaving Applitools
None of the tools above matches all of this:
- Match levels. Applitools lets you choose how strictly a checkpoint is compared, for example Strict or Layout, and recommends Layout for cross-browser checks. Pixel-based tools need thresholds and masks to get a similar result.
- The Ultrafast Grid. The SDK sends the page’s DOM and resources once, and Applitools re-renders it on Edge and Internet Explorer on Windows, Safari on macOS, other browsers on Linux, emulated Android devices and iOS simulators.
- One platform. Starter bundles accessibility testing, Storybook, Figma and root-cause analysis in one subscription. Moving to a narrower tool can mean buying some of that elsewhere.
- Enterprise features such as private cloud, SSO and custom SLAs on the higher plans.
Before you migrate
Three practical things, whichever way you go:
- Assume baselines don’t transfer. Argos’s guide to migrating from Applitools says so directly, and we found no documented import in the other tools. Expect to capture a fresh baseline and approve a noisy first run. Plan the switch for a quiet week, not the day before a release.
- Recount your volume in the new tool’s unit. Checkpoints, screenshots and snapshots are counted differently, and browsers, widths and component states may or may not multiply. Work out your real monthly number for each candidate before comparing prices, because the answer often changes the ranking.
- Decide who reviews. This decides whether visual testing survives. If developers approve changes on the pull request, Argos, Chromatic or Percy fit. If a QA lead, a project manager or a client has to sign off, they need a UI they can use without opening a test run.
Where to go next
- The best visual regression testing tools in 2026: the full landscape, including the open-source options in more depth.
- What visual regression testing is, if you are evaluating the category rather than a specific tool.
- Fixing false positives: the thing that decides whether any of these tools sticks.
Try Diffy free: 500 screenshots a month, no credit card, no test suite required.