Skip to content
testcritic

BackstopJS vs Lost Pixel

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.

BackstopJSVisual Testing
Lost PixelVisual Testing

Entry price

Free and open source

Open source

From $100 per month (Startup; Business $250, Scale $670)

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

The hosted tiers are still listed and priced by monthly screenshots, but the site carries a sunset banner — do not start here. The MIT-licensed runner still works self-hosted, though its repository is archived.

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Open-source runner is free and unlimited when self-hosted, and the hosted platform has a free tier.

Open source

MIT

MIT (core)

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScript
JavaScriptTypeScript

Platforms

Web
Web

Fits teams

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

Adoption

Established

OSS community · since 2015

Emerging

Lost Pixel · since 2022

Strengths

  • Free with no snapshot quota — run it as often as you like.
  • Baselines stay in your repository, which suits regulated or air-gapped environments.
  • Simple JSON configuration that a junior engineer can extend.
  • The self-hosted runner keeps working and its baselines live in your repo, so a sunset does not strand your tests.
  • Works with Storybook and with plain page URLs.
  • Clean GitHub Actions integration.

Limitations

  • Pixel-diff comparison means font rendering differences between machines cause false failures; Docker is effectively mandatory.
  • No hosted review or approval workflow — approving means committing new images.
  • Reference images bloat the Git repository over time.
  • Being sunset: the team joined Figma in April 2026 and no shutdown date for the hosted platform has been published.
  • Fewer browser and device permutations than the incumbents.
  • Less sophisticated diffing than Applitools' visual AI.

Best for

Teams that need visual testing without a SaaS vendor or a per-snapshot bill.

Existing users planning a move. Argos and Chromatic are the usual destinations.

Full review
Full review

All of these integrate with: Playwright, GitHub Actions.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.