Lost Pixel vs BackstopJS
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 (Startup; Business $250, Scale $670)
Free tierFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
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 and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Open-source runner is free and unlimited when self-hosted, and the hosted platform has a free tier.
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
MIT (core)
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Emerging
Lost Pixel · since 2022
Established
OSS community · since 2015
Strengths
- 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.
- 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.
Limitations
- 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.
- 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.
Best for
Existing users planning a move. Argos and Chromatic are the usual destinations.
Teams that need visual testing without a SaaS vendor or a per-snapshot bill.
All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions, Playwright.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.