Free Visual Regression Testing Tool
Diffy has a free plan, and it isn’t a 14-day trial. You get 500 screenshots every month to compare your staging and production sites, catch layout regressions and share the results with your team. You don’t need a credit card, a repository or anything installed. Paste your URLs into a browser tab and run your first comparison in a few minutes.
What the free plan includes
- 500 screenshots a month. One screenshot is one page at one breakpoint. The allowance resets every month.
- Production and staging environments. Diffy swaps the domain in every URL automatically, so you keep one page list and compare the two sites with a click.
- Before-and-after comparisons. Take a set of screenshots, deploy or update, take another set and compare.
- Scheduled runs on the days and at the time you choose, so production is checked even when nobody deploys.
- Every screenshot setting. Mask or hide elements, set cookies and HTTP headers, inject CSS or JavaScript, mock dynamic content, add delays and take screenshots as a logged-in user. These are what keep results free of false positives, and they aren’t locked behind a paid plan.
- Any breakpoints you like, from 240px to 2000px wide.
- Team members, so a developer, a QA lead and a project manager can all review the same comparison.
- One month of history for screenshots and comparisons.
What you need a paid plan for
We’d rather tell you now than have you find out mid-setup:
- CI and API access. The Diffy CLI, the GitHub pull request integration, the Upsun and Pantheon workflows and the Claude plugin all use the API, which comes with paid plans.
- Development and custom environments. Comparing against a pull request preview URL or your local site (DDEV, Lando, ngrok) needs a paid plan. The free plan covers production and staging.
- Longer history. Paid plans keep screenshots for 6 months instead of 1.
- More screenshots. Paid plans start at 2,000 a month.
How far 500 screenshots go
It depends on how many pages and breakpoints you test, and whether you screenshot one environment or two per comparison.
| What you test | Screenshots per comparison | Comparisons per month |
|---|---|---|
| 20 key pages × 3 breakpoints, staging vs production | 120 | 4 |
| 40 pages × 3 breakpoints, one site before and after an update | 240 | 2 |
| 10 pages × 5 breakpoints, scheduled weekly on production | 50 per run | 10 runs |
| 80 pages × 3 breakpoints, one-off staging vs production check | 480 | 1 |
A tip for making the allowance go further: you rarely need every URL. One or two examples of each template (homepage, landing page, article, listing, product, form) catch most regressions, because a broken template usually breaks every page built on it.
Free hosted tool vs free open-source tools
The other free route is open source. BackstopJS and Playwright’s built-in screenshot assertions are both solid tools, and they’re free with no screenshot limit. The cost is your time rather than money.
| Diffy free plan | BackstopJS | Playwright toHaveScreenshot() | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free up to 500 screenshots/month | Free, open source | Free, open source |
| Setup | Paste URLs in a browser tab | Node install, backstop.json config | Node install, write tests in code |
| Where screenshots run | Diffy’s cloud | Your machine or CI | Your machine or CI |
| Baselines | Stored and managed by Diffy | Image files you store and update | Image files in your repo, per browser and OS |
| Reviewing results | Web UI with side-by-side slider, shareable links | Local HTML report | Local HTML report or CI artifact |
| Non-developers can use it | Yes | Not really | No |
| Limit | 500 screenshots/month | None | None |
Choose open source if you’re a developer who wants unlimited screenshots, you’re happy to maintain the config and baselines in your repository, and the only people reviewing results are also developers.
Choose Diffy if you’d rather not maintain a testing setup, you need a project manager, QA person or client to review changes, or you’re comparing whole websites rather than components in a test suite. Playwright saves baselines per browser and operating system, because fonts and rendering differ between them. A baseline captured on a Mac won’t match a run in Linux CI, so teams usually end up generating baselines inside Docker. Diffy renders every screenshot in the same cloud environment, so that problem doesn’t come up.
We’ve written detailed comparisons of both: Diffy vs BackstopJS and Diffy vs Playwright.
Your first comparison in five steps
- Create a free account. No credit card.
- Create a project with your production URL. Diffy can collect pages from your sitemap.xml, from links on a page, or from a list you paste in.
- Add your staging URL as the second environment. Add the basic auth username and password if staging is protected.
- Choose breakpoints. Three is a good start: mobile, tablet and desktop.
- Run the comparison. Diffy screenshots both environments and highlights every difference. Approve the expected changes and fix the rest.
If screenshots come back blocked, your CDN or firewall is probably stopping Diffy’s workers. Allowlist the worker IP and try again.
When to upgrade
Most teams upgrade when they want comparisons to run automatically on every deploy or pull request, or when they add more sites than 500 screenshots a month cover. Paid plans start at $67 a month (billed annually) for 2,000 screenshots and include CI automation, API access, all environment types and 6 months of history. See pricing for all tiers.
Frequently asked questions
Is the free plan really free, or is it a trial?
It’s a permanent free plan. It doesn’t expire and there’s no credit card on file. If you use up the 500 screenshots before the month ends, you can wait for the reset or upgrade.
Do I need to install anything?
No. Diffy loads your pages in a real browser in the cloud. There’s no plugin, package or script to add to your site.
Can I use the free plan for client sites?
Yes. A common way to start is one client site on the free plan, then upgrading once you want to cover all your sites or automate the checks.
What happens to my screenshots after a month?
On the free plan, screenshots and comparisons are kept for one month. For longer history, for example to keep before-and-after evidence for maintenance reports, paid plans keep them for 6 months.
Try it on your own site
It takes about as long to set up as it took to read this page.
Start free: 500 screenshots a month
Related: How to avoid false positives · Responsive design testing · Visual testing explained