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Percy 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

Free tier available

Free tier

Quote on request

Quote only

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

BrowserStack no longer publishes standalone Percy prices — its own /percy/pricing page is gone and Percy now appears bundled into wider BrowserStack packages (it is one of the products in Team Ultimate at $375/month billed annually) or priced by sales. Paid plans still include a fixed screenshot allowance with overage on top, so multiply pages x widths x browsers x commits before committing — this is where budgets are misjudged.

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

Free tier

5,000 screenshots a month, unlimited users and projects.

Free tier for individual developers with a monthly checkpoint allowance.

Open source

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonRubyJava
JavaScriptTypeScriptJavaPythonC#Ruby

Platforms

Web
WebiOSAndroidDesktop

Fits teams

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

Adoption

Widely used

BrowserStack · since 2015

Widely used

Applitools · since 2013

Strengths

  • Plugs into an existing suite with a few lines rather than requiring new tests.
  • Server-side rendering removes machine-to-machine screenshot inconsistency.
  • Good PR-based approval workflow that developers actually use.
  • 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

  • Screenshot-based billing escalates faster than teams expect.
  • Dynamic content requires careful masking or you drown in false diffs.
  • Responsive widths are rendered, not truly executed in each browser, which occasionally hides real issues.
  • Expensive, and priced opaquely.
  • Substantial platform to learn beyond simple snapshot comparison.
  • Overkill if you have twenty pages and a stable design.

Best for

Teams with an existing E2E or Storybook suite who want visual coverage without new tests.

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

All of these integrate with: Cypress, Playwright, Selenium, Storybook, GitHub, Jenkins.

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