Applitools Eyes vs Chromatic
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Quote on request
Quote onlyFrom $179 per month (Starter, 35k snapshots)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Quote-based enterprise pricing by checkpoints. Typically the most expensive option in the category.
Snapshot-based billing: Starter $179 for 35k snapshots, Pro $399 for 85k, then Enterprise. Overage runs about $0.008 a snapshot. TurboSnap, which only re-tests stories affected by a change, is the main cost control. Cross-browser coverage beyond Chrome starts at Starter.
Free tier
Free tier for individual developers with a monthly checkpoint allowance.
Free tier with 5,000 billed snapshots a month (25k TurboSnaps), unlimited projects and users.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Applitools · since 2013
Widely used
Chromatic · since 2017
Strengths
- The lowest false-positive rate in the category — the reason teams migrate to it from pixel-diff tools.
- Ultrafast Grid replaces a lot of cross-browser execution with one render pass.
- Root-cause analysis points at the DOM/CSS change behind a visual diff.
- Zero-effort setup if you already have Storybook — stories are the tests.
- The hosted review UI is genuinely usable by designers and product managers.
- TurboSnap dramatically reduces snapshot cost on large libraries.
Limitations
- Expensive, and priced opaquely.
- Substantial platform to learn beyond simple snapshot comparison.
- Overkill if you have twenty pages and a stable design.
- Strongly tied to Storybook; without it much of the value disappears.
- Component-level, not full-page — it will not catch a broken page layout.
- Snapshot pricing still adds up on a big design system.
Best for
Enterprises where visual correctness across many browsers is a business requirement.
Design-system and component-library teams already invested in Storybook.
All of these integrate with: Playwright, Storybook, GitHub.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.