Setting up screenshot comparison in Playwright, Cypress, Storybook, Puppeteer, and Selenium — with the current APIs, not the deprecated ones.
Vitest browser mode ships visual comparison natively through toMatchScreenshot. How to set it up, why the ecosystem is moving here from the Storybook test-runner, and the stability problem Vitest is unusually honest about.
Native apps break visually in ways the web does not — dynamic type, notches, dark mode, OS version skew. What XCUITest, Espresso, React Native and the hosted tools each cover, and why device fragmentation is the real cost.
Cypress screenshots but does not compare. Here are the maintained plugins that add image diffing in 2026, which fork of cypress-image-snapshot to use, and how to keep the results stable.
The Storybook test-runner has been superseded by the Vitest addon. Here is what that changes, the current options for visual testing stories — Chromatic, Loki, Vitest browser mode, Argos — and what story-level coverage still misses.
Puppeteer captures but does not compare. This builds a working visual regression setup with pixelmatch, covers the determinism you have to add yourself, and is honest about when to stop and use a tool.
Selenium captures screenshots but has no comparison layer. The options for adding visual regression testing to an existing Selenium suite — commercial SDKs, self-built comparison, and when migrating is the better answer.
Set up screenshot comparison in Playwright with toHaveScreenshot, stabilise the page so runs are deterministic, and wire baselines into CI without fighting the machine they were captured on.