Visual Testing Pricing in 2026: 8 Tools Compared
Visual testing tools all sell the same thing, a number of images a month, but they count those images differently, bill at different points and treat a busy month differently. This page puts the published prices side by side, then shows what the same website costs on each tool once you count the way the vendor counts.
Every price below comes from the vendor’s own pricing page or documentation, checked on 4 November 2026. Diffy is our product; we’ve tried to be as plain about where it loses on price as about where it wins.
Visual testing pricing at a glance
| Tool | Free tier | Cheapest paid plan | Extra units on paid plans |
|---|---|---|---|
| Diffy | 500 screenshots a month | $67/month billed annually ($80 monthly), 2,000 screenshots | Not billed: screenshots pause at the limit |
| Percy | 5,000 screenshots a month | $199/month billed annually ($249 monthly), 10,000 screenshots | $0.036 each |
| Chromatic | 5,000 snapshots a month, Chrome only | $179/month, 35,000 snapshots | $0.008 each on Starter |
| Argos | Up to 5,000 screenshots, one-person account | $100/month, 35,000 screenshots | $0.004 each |
| Happo | 5,000 snapshots a month, Chrome only | $149/month, 50,000 snapshots | $0.006 each |
| Applitools | Free trial, no free plan | $667/month paid annually, 1,000 page checkpoints | Not stated on the pricing page |
| Sauce Labs Visual | Free trial, no free plan | $149/month billed annually ($199 monthly), 500 snapshots a month | Not stated on the pricing page |
| TestMu AI SmartUI | 2,000 screenshots for the lifetime of the account | From $199/month billed annually | Not stated on the pricing page |
Open-source tools such as Playwright’s toHaveScreenshot() and BackstopJS have no licence cost. What you pay instead is the time to run them, keep baselines and review results yourself.
What counts as one screenshot
This is the part that changes the ranking, so it comes before the plan-by-plan detail.
- Diffy: one page at one breakpoint is one screenshot. Each project captures in one browser engine, Chrome or WebKit. Comparing two freshly captured environments, such as production and staging, takes a set from each, so it uses twice the screenshots of a single run against a saved baseline.
- Percy: “a rendering of a page or component in an individual browser and responsive width combination”. Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari are enabled by default on new projects, and each browser counts separately. Percy’s support FAQ adds that failed snapshot attempts count too.
- Chromatic: visual snapshots = tests × builds × browsers × modes. A mode is a viewport, theme or similar variant. With TurboSnap, unchanged stories reuse their previous snapshot and are billed at 0.2 of a snapshot each.
- Argos: every snapshot stored for a build counts as one screenshot. You produce the screenshots in your own tests or pipeline and upload them.
- Happo: one screenshot of one component variant, story or page, in one target. Each browser, and an accessibility check, is a separate target.
- Applitools: plans are sold in checkpoints (Starter) and in active pages or components (Professional, Enterprise). Professional lists unlimited browsers and devices per Visual AI check, but the pricing page doesn’t say how browsers and viewports count against Starter’s checkpoints, so ask before you size a plan.
The same website on each tool
Take a 20-page site checked at three widths, 30 times a month. That’s 60 images a run before any browser multiplication.
| Tool and setup | Units a month | Cheapest plan that covers it |
|---|---|---|
| Diffy, compared against a saved baseline | 1,800 | $67/month billed annually ($80 monthly) |
| Diffy, production vs staging, both captured fresh | 3,600 | $125/month billed annually ($150 monthly) |
| Percy, Chrome only | 1,800 | Free |
| Percy, default four browsers | 7,200 | Desktop, $199/month billed annually ($249 monthly) |
| Chromatic, Chrome only | 1,800 | Free |
| Chromatic, four browsers | 7,200 | Starter, $179/month |
| Argos, one browser | 1,800 | Free on Hobby (one person); $100/month on Pro for a team |
| Happo, Chrome only | 1,800 | Free |
| Happo, Chrome and Firefox | 3,600 | Starter, $149/month |
At this size Percy, Chromatic, Argos and Happo all have a free option, and Diffy doesn’t. Most of those free options work from a test suite, a Storybook or a pipeline you already run. Diffy’s price includes capturing the pages itself from a list of URLs, with no test code.
Cost at three volumes
List prices for the cheapest published plan that covers each monthly volume, counted in each tool’s own unit, in one browser.
| Tool | 2,000 a month | 10,000 a month | 30,000 a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Diffy | $67 annual / $80 monthly | $250 annual / $300 monthly (30,000 plan) | $250 annual / $300 monthly |
| Percy | Free | $199 annual / $249 monthly | About $629 annual / $729 monthly (Desktop 25,000 plus 5,000 extra at $0.036) |
| Chromatic | Free (Chrome) | $179 | $179 |
| Argos | Free (one person) or $100 | $100 | $100 |
| Happo | Free (Chrome) | $149 | $149 |
Applitools isn’t in this table because its pricing page doesn’t say how an image maps to a checkpoint. Sauce Labs Visual includes 500 snapshots a month and SmartUI’s tiers have no per-tier prices on its page, so neither can be priced at these volumes either.
Read plainly: above 8,000 images a month, Argos, Happo and Chromatic all cost less than Diffy, and between 5,000 and 8,000 Argos does. Diffy also has no published plan between 8,000 and 30,000 screenshots. Diffy’s case is the work around the images, not the price per image. Its customers don’t write or maintain tests to capture them, and non-developers can review the results.
Diffy pricing
| Plan | Annual billing | Monthly billing | Screenshots a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 500 |
| Pro 2,000 | $67/month | $80/month | 2,000 |
| Pro 8,000 | $125/month | $150/month | 8,000 |
| Pro 30,000 | $250/month | $300/month | 30,000 |
- Free includes production and staging environments, screenshot modification settings, team management and one month of history.
- Paid plans add more environments, CI automation and six months of history.
- Over the limit: Diffy doesn’t bill overage. Your team gets an email at 90% of the allowance, and at 100% new screenshots pause until the month resets or you move up a plan. Your invoice is the number on your plan.
- Users: plans are priced by screenshot volume; there’s no per-user price.
- Browsers: Chrome or WebKit, chosen per project, at widths from 240px to 2000px.
See pricing for the current plans.
Percy pricing
| Plan | Annual billing | Monthly billing | Screenshots a month | Extra screenshots |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 5,000 | — |
| Desktop | $199/month | $249/month | 10,000 | $0.036 |
| Desktop | $449/month | $549/month | 25,000 | $0.036 |
| Desktop & Mobile | $599/month | $729/month | 25,000 | $0.048 |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Contact sales | Custom | — |
Free, Desktop and Desktop & Mobile all have unlimited users and list Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari. Desktop & Mobile adds real mobile devices and mobile browsers. Build history is one month on Free and 12 months on Desktop and Desktop & Mobile. The pricing page says annual billing saves up to 25%, and both plans also offer custom screenshot volumes.
Watch the default browser setting. A page at three widths in Percy’s four default browsers is 12 screenshots, so turning off the browsers you don’t need is the quickest way to cut the bill.
Percy alternatives · Diffy vs Percy
Chromatic pricing
| Plan | Price | Snapshots a month | Browsers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 5,000 | Chrome |
| Starter | $179/month | 35,000 | Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge |
| Pro | $399/month | 85,000 | Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge |
All plans have unlimited projects and collaborators. The pricing page lists extra snapshots at $0.008 on Starter. On paid plans testing continues past the allowance and the extra snapshots are charged at the end of the billing period. On Free, review and testing pause once the 5,000 snapshots are used.
Chromatic’s billing docs say self-serve plans are billed monthly only; annual payment means Enterprise. They also guarantee at least 12 months of build and snapshot retention on every plan.
Full head-to-head: Diffy vs Chromatic
Argos pricing
| Plan | Price | Screenshots | Extra screenshots |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | $0 | Up to 5,000 | None: uploads pause until the next billing period |
| Pro | From $100/month, billed monthly based on usage | 35,000 included | $0.004, or $0.0015 for Storybook screenshots |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | — |
Hobby is a personal account, so team reviews start at Pro. GitHub SSO ($50/month) and SAML SSO with SCIM ($200/month) are add-ons on Pro, and SAML SSO with SCIM is included on Enterprise. You can cap overage with spend management. Argos’s docs say builds, screenshots and diffs are kept with no expiry on every plan; shared media links are a separate feature and expire after 30 days on Hobby and one year on Pro.
Full head-to-head: Diffy vs Argos
Happo pricing
| Plan | Price | Snapshots a month | Browsers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 5,000 | Chrome |
| Starter | $149/month | 50,000 | Chrome, Firefox |
| Growth | $399/month | 150,000 | Chrome, Firefox, Safari |
| Pro | $749/month | 300,000 | Chrome, Firefox, Safari, iOS Safari, Edge |
| Enterprise | Custom | A million and up | Every browser |
Extra snapshots on Starter, Growth and Pro are $0.006 each. Free is never billed: it pauses at the limit. Every plan has unlimited users, and the pricing page says annual billing is available on Pro and Enterprise.
The catch for cross-browser work is that Safari starts on Growth and iOS Safari and Edge on Pro.
Full head-to-head: Diffy vs Happo
Applitools pricing
| 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 and no free plan. Starter is more than visual testing: the pricing page also lists 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’d use those, the price buys more than screenshots.
Applitools alternatives · Diffy vs Applitools
Sauce Labs Visual and TestMu AI SmartUI pricing
Both sell visual testing as part of a browser and device testing platform.
- Sauce Labs: the 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. The page doesn’t list a price for extra snapshots.
- TestMu AI SmartUI (formerly LambdaTest): the free plan is 2,000 screenshots for the lifetime of the account, not per month. SmartUI Visual Regression starts at $199/month billed annually, and the page lists tiers from 15,000 to 200,000 screenshots a month without a separate price for each.
These make sense if you need the device grid anyway. As stand-alone visual testing, 500 snapshots a month for $149 is a small allowance.
How to compare quotes
- Count your real monthly number in each tool’s unit. Multiply pages or components by widths, browsers, themes and runs a month. A number that fits a free tier in one browser can need a paid plan in four.
- Check what happens in a busy month. Diffy, and the free tiers of Chromatic, Argos and Happo, pause at the limit. Percy, Chromatic, Argos and Happo bill extra screenshots on paid plans. Neither is wrong, but one surprises you with an invoice and the other with a skipped run.
- Check monthly vs annual. Applitools’ published price is annual only. Chromatic’s self-serve plans and Argos Pro are monthly. Diffy, Percy and Sauce Labs offer both, and Happo offers annual billing on Pro and Enterprise.
- Price the work around the screenshots. Chromatic, Argos and Applitools build on your stories, tests or a pipeline that produces screenshots, and most of Percy’s and Happo’s integrations do too. Someone has to write and maintain that. URL-based tools like Diffy and BackstopJS start from a list of pages.
Where to go next
- The best visual regression testing tools in 2026: the tools themselves, beyond price.
- Free visual regression testing: what you can do without paying anything.
- What visual regression testing is, if you’re evaluating the category rather than a tool.
Try Diffy free: 500 screenshots a month, no test suite required.