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testcritic

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 tier

From $179 per month (Starter, 35k snapshots)

Free tier

What 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

JavaScriptTypeScript
JavaScriptTypeScript

Platforms

Web
Web

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

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.