Percy 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
Free tier available
Free tierFrom $179 per month (Starter, 35k snapshots)
Free tierWhat 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.
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
5,000 screenshots a month, unlimited users and projects.
Free tier with 5,000 billed snapshots a month (25k TurboSnaps), unlimited projects and users.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
BrowserStack · since 2015
Widely used
Chromatic · since 2017
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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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
Teams with an existing E2E or Storybook suite who want visual coverage without new tests.
Design-system and component-library teams already invested in Storybook.
All of these integrate with: Playwright, Storybook, GitHub, GitLab.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.