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testcritic

Lost Pixel 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 (Startup; Business $250, Scale $670)

Free tier

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

Free tier

What 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.

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

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

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

Open source

MIT (core)

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

Lost Pixel · since 2022

Widely used

Chromatic · since 2017

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.
  • 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

  • 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.
  • 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

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

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

All of these integrate with: Storybook, Playwright.

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