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testcritic

Chromatic vs Applitools Eyes

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 $179 per month (Starter, 35k snapshots)

Free tier

Quote on request

Quote only

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

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.

Quote-based enterprise pricing by checkpoints. Typically the most expensive option in the category.

Free tier

Free tier with 5,000 billed snapshots a month (25k TurboSnaps), unlimited projects and users.

Free tier for individual developers with a monthly checkpoint allowance.

Open source

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScript
JavaScriptTypeScriptJavaPythonC#Ruby

Platforms

Web
WebiOSAndroidDesktop

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Chromatic · since 2017

Widely used

Applitools · since 2013

Strengths

  • 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.
  • 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.

Limitations

  • 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.
  • Expensive, and priced opaquely.
  • Substantial platform to learn beyond simple snapshot comparison.
  • Overkill if you have twenty pages and a stable design.

Best for

Design-system and component-library teams already invested in Storybook.

Enterprises where visual correctness across many browsers is a business requirement.

All of these integrate with: Storybook, GitHub, Playwright.

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