Percy vs Lost Pixel
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 $100 per month (Startup; Business $250, Scale $670)
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.
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 tier
5,000 screenshots a month, unlimited users and projects.
Open-source runner is free and unlimited when self-hosted, and the hosted platform has a free tier.
Open source
MIT (core)
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
BrowserStack · since 2015
Emerging
Lost Pixel · since 2022
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 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.
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.
- 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.
Best for
Teams with an existing E2E or Storybook suite who want visual coverage without new tests.
Existing users planning a move. Argos and Chromatic are the usual destinations.
All of these integrate with: Playwright, Storybook.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.