Diffy vs Sauce Labs Visual: An Alternative for Websites

Sauce Labs is one of the best-known cloud testing platforms: thousands of desktop browser and OS combinations, emulators, simulators and real mobile devices. Its visual testing product, Sauce Visual, adds screenshot comparison to the automated tests you run there. (Sauce Labs acquired Screener in 2019; the old Screener documentation now redirects to Sauce Visual.) Diffy is a dedicated visual regression testing service for websites: you give it URLs, it takes the screenshots across production, staging and development, and shows you what changed. Both end with a reviewer approving or rejecting changes. They start from very different places.

What each tool needs from you

Sauce Visual adds snapshots to your existing tests. In Sauce Labs’ words, users “often have an existing test suite in WebdriverIO, Cypress or a similar framework”, and that suite is enhanced “with a few extra ‘take a snapshot’ statements”. There are integrations for Cypress, Playwright, WebdriverIO, Nightwatch, Java, C#/.NET, Python, Robot Framework and Storybook, plus Espresso and Appium for native Android and iOS apps, a Figma integration and a CLI for PDF snapshots. You install the package for your framework, set your Sauce Labs username and access key, and call sauceVisualCheck (or visualCheck in Playwright) wherever you want a snapshot. Waits, clipping to an element, full-page capture and ignore regions are options on that call.

Diffy takes the screenshots for you. You create a project in a browser tab, paste the addresses of the pages you care about, pick breakpoints and press a button. Diffy’s workers load each page in Chrome or WebKit and capture it. Logins, elements to hide, content to mock, cookies, headers and a schedule are settings on the project page. There’s no test file and no framework to install unless you want automation, and then the CLI, API and CI integrations are there.

So the question is what you already have. If your team runs Selenium, Cypress, Playwright or Appium suites on Sauce Labs, visual checks are a few extra lines in tests you already maintain. If you look after Drupal, WordPress or headless websites and nobody wants to write and maintain a test suite to find out whether the pages still look right, read on.

Pricing

Sauce Labs doesn’t publish a price for Sauce Visual on its own. Visual testing is included in two platform plans:

Plan	Visual snapshots per month	Billed annually	Month-to-month
Virtual Device Cloud	500	$149/mo	$199/mo
Real Device Cloud	500	$199/mo	$249/mo
Sauce Visual (standalone) and Enterprise	Custom	Contact sales	Contact sales

Those prices are for one parallel test; more parallel sessions cost more. Both plans include unlimited users and unlimited automated testing minutes on Sauce Labs’ browser and device cloud. The cheapest plan, Live Testing at $39/mo, is for manual testing and doesn’t include visual testing. Single sign-on and team management are on the Enterprise level. There’s a free trial.

Diffy

Screenshots per month	Billed annually	Month-to-month
500 (Free)	$0	$0
2,000	$67/mo	$80/mo
8,000	$125/mo	$150/mo
30,000	$250/mo	$300/mo

Team members are included on every Diffy plan. Paid plans add CI automation, development and custom environments, and 6 months of history (1 month on the free plan). The API is included in every plan, the free one too.

Comparing like with like is hard here. $149 a month on Sauce Labs buys a whole cross-browser testing cloud, and visual testing is one feature of it, with 500 snapshots a month. If you’re already paying for that cloud, those snapshots come at no extra cost. If visual checks of a website are what you actually need, Diffy’s $67 plan gives you 2,000 screenshots a month, and the free plan gives you as many snapshots as Sauce Labs’ paid plans do.

Sauce Labs prices as published on saucelabs.com/pricing in October 2026. Check both pricing pages before you commit, everyone changes prices eventually.

Baselines vs environments

Sauce Visual matches each snapshot to a baseline by its metadata: the snapshot name, test and suite name, browser, operating system and version, device, project and branch. If several baselines match, it uses the most recent. The first run of a new snapshot creates a baseline that someone has to accept. You can set a branch and a default branch so feature branches compare against the right baselines. It’s a model built for test suites that run on every build.

Diffy is organised around environments. Production, staging and development are first-class, you can add custom ones, and you can compare any set of screenshots with any other. The questions it answers naturally are about deployed sites:

• Does staging still match production before we go live?
• Did anything on production change overnight, without a deploy? Scheduled runs compare a site against itself over time.
• Does this Pantheon multidev, Upsun or Tugboat preview match production?
• Did the core, plugin or module update we just applied move anything on the site’s templates?

CMS updates often have no test run or commit behind them at all: a plugin updated from the WordPress admin, or a composer update on a server. That’s the case Diffy was built for. See Drupal and WordPress visual regression testing.

Handling real-world pages

Sauce Visual gives you strong tools in code. Ignore regions can be set by selector or by coordinates, in code or in the review UI. With DOM capture turned on and the Balanced diffing engine, selective diffing lets you ignore particular kinds of change (content, dimensions, position, structure or style) for a whole snapshot or a region. Anything else, like closing a cookie banner, logging in or waiting for a slider, is code in your test.

In Diffy those are settings in the UI:

• Log in before the screenshot, with presets for Drupal, WordPress and Netlify, plus a custom option.
• Mock dynamic content by giving Diffy selectors whose contents get replaced with placeholder text.
• Remove or mask elements. Embedded videos and maps are masked by default.
• Inject CSS or JavaScript, set HTTP headers, cookies and a custom User-Agent.
• Any breakpoint from 240px to 2000px. Retina and night mode are checkboxes.
• Vertical shifts. Diffy’s own comparison algorithm recognises content that moved down, so one taller header doesn’t light up the whole page.

Reviewing changes

Sauce Visual’s review happens in the Sauce Labs UI. A build lists its snapshots, which you can group by suite, test, device, OS or Storybook component. Each diff opens side by side or as an overlay, with keyboard shortcuts to accept, reject and move between snapshots, and you can accept a whole build at once. With DOM capture, the Diff Inspector shows which HTML, computed CSS, position or size changes caused the visual difference, which is genuinely useful for developers.

Diffy’s review is built around a whole site at once:

• Thumbnail view, with approval directly from the thumbnails
• The same change grouped across every screenshot it appears in, so a header change on 200 pages is one decision, not 200
• Approve a single change, a screenshot, or a page across all breakpoints, or mark it as a bug
• A before/after slider and keyboard shortcuts
• Shareable links that work for people without a Diffy account
• An AI summary of what changed in the comparison, which can also be posted to Slack

Where Sauce Labs is the better fit

• You already run tests on Sauce Labs. Visual checks are a few lines in suites you maintain anyway, and the snapshots are included in your plan.
• Browser and device coverage. Thousands of desktop browser and OS combinations, emulators, simulators and real devices. Diffy captures in Chrome and WebKit only.
• Native mobile apps. Visual checks for Android and iOS apps through Appium and Espresso. Diffy tests web pages only.
• Developer-level diagnostics. The Diff Inspector ties a visual change to the DOM and CSS change behind it, and selective diffing can ignore whole categories of change.
• One vendor for everything. Manual testing, automated testing, devices, visual testing and enterprise controls such as SSO in one contract.

Try it

Create an account, paste your URLs and run your first comparison. Most teams have real results within 10 minutes, and there’s nothing to uninstall if it isn’t for you.

Start free: 500 screenshots a month

Comparing other tools too? See Percy alternatives, Applitools alternatives and Diffy vs Argos.