Argos 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
From $100 per month (Pro, usage-based, 35k screenshots included)
Free tierFrom $179 per month (Starter, 35k snapshots)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Pro is usage-based from $100/month including 35,000 screenshots, with extras at $0.004 each ($0.0015 for Storybook). SSO is a paid add-on: $50/month for GitHub, $200/month for SAML.
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
Hobby plan is free forever with up to 5,000 screenshots; free for open-source projects.
Free tier with 5,000 billed snapshots a month (25k TurboSnaps), unlimited projects and users.
Open source
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Emerging
Argos · since 2017
Widely used
Chromatic · since 2017
Strengths
- Clean, fast PR review experience.
- Genuinely affordable, with a workable free tier.
- Open source, so self-hosting is a real fallback.
- 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
- Fewer integrations than Percy or Applitools.
- Small team behind it.
- Limited cross-browser rendering options.
- 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
Small and mid-sized teams wanting visual review in PRs at a sane price.
Design-system and component-library teams already invested in Storybook.
All of these integrate with: Playwright, Storybook, GitHub, GitLab.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.