Percy alternatives
Percy's standalone pricing page no longer resolves and paid tiers route to sales. Here are the alternatives, what each costs, and how to migrate a Percy integration without rewriting your suite.
Percy defined this category, and the product still works. Most teams looking for an alternative are prompted by one of three things: the pricing signals since the BrowserStack acquisition, a need for coverage Percy does not author for you, or a per-screenshot bill that stopped making sense at volume.
Quick comparison
| Alternative | Entry price | Closest to Percy on | Migration effort |
|---|---|---|---|
| Argos | Free 5,000 → $100/mo 35,000 | Hosted review, page-level | Low |
| Chromatic | Free 5,000 → $179/mo 35,000 | Hosted review, component-level | Medium — needs Storybook |
| Applitools | $667/mo billed annually | Enterprise scale, cross-browser | Low — SDK swap |
| SmartUI | Free 2,000 | Broad SDK coverage, mobile | Low — SDK swap |
| Playwright | Free | Nothing hosted — you self-host | High |
| reg-suit | Free | Git-keyed baselines | High |
| VisualMax | Free week, then paid | Hosted review, no suite to write | None — no SDK |
The alternatives
Best for: The closest like-for-like swap if you want published pricing and a hosted review UI.
- License
- Open source, with a hosted commercial tier
- Pricing
- Hobby free 5,000 screenshots/mo · Pro $100/mo for 35,000, then $0.004 each
The most direct replacement for a team that liked Percy's workflow and wants to know what it will cost next year. At $100/mo for 35,000 screenshots it is priced well below where Percy's paid tiers historically sat.
- Published, predictable pricing — the thing Percy no longer offers
- Full review and approval workflow, same shape as Percy's
- Open-source core, so self-hosting remains a fallback
- Direct Playwright and Storybook integrations
- Smaller integration surface than Percy's 50+
- You still author the tests that produce screenshots, exactly as with Percy
- Younger product with a smaller support organisation
Best for: Enterprises replacing Percy at scale who need cross-browser rendering.
- License
- Commercial
- Pricing
- Starter $667/mo billed annually = 100,000 component checkpoints or 1,000 page checkpoints
If you are leaving Percy because you outgrew it rather than because of price, this is the usual destination. Do the checkpoint arithmetic against your real route count first — page checkpoints are what a Percy-style workflow consumes, and 1,000 of them goes quickly.
- Visual AI genuinely outperforms pixel diffing on rendering noise
- Ultrafast Grid renders across browsers without you running that infrastructure
- SDK coverage comparable to Percy's, so the integration shape is familiar
- Unlimited users on every tier
- Considerably more expensive than Percy's historical entry tiers
- The page-versus-component checkpoint split is the real pricing axis — 1,000 page checkpoints is a small budget
- Above Starter, pricing is also contact-sales
Best for: Teams whose visual truth already lives in Storybook.
- License
- Commercial
- Pricing
- Free 5,000 billed snapshots (Chrome only) · Starter $179/mo 35,000 · Pro $399/mo 85,000
A strong product but not a like-for-like swap. Percy typically captures routes in a running application; Chromatic captures stories. If your Percy integration was page-level, moving to Chromatic means building story coverage first — see Storybook visual regression testing.
- Published pricing across every tier
- TurboSnap stretches the billed allowance roughly fivefold by copying unchanged snapshots
- Best-in-class review UI with design collaboration
- Unlimited projects, collaborators, and parallel runs on all tiers
- Requires Storybook — a significant migration if Percy was capturing real routes
- Coverage becomes story coverage; a page with no story is invisible
- Multi-browser needs the $179/mo tier; the free plan is Chrome only
Best for: Percy users whose surface includes native mobile.
- License
- Commercial
- Pricing
- Free plan 2,000 screenshots · paid pricing not published
Worth evaluating specifically if mobile is part of why Percy stopped fitting. On pricing transparency it is no improvement — you will be talking to sales either way.
- Supports Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Puppeteer, Jest, Appium, XCUITest and Espresso
- Native iOS and Android visual testing, which Percy does not match
- Figma-to-page comparison and PDF visual testing
- 120+ integrations
- Paid pricing is also unpublished, so you trade one opaque quote for another
- Free allowance is the smallest here at 2,000 screenshots
- LambdaTest rebranded to TestMu AI in January 2026, so documentation is scattered across both names
Best for: Teams leaving Percy specifically to stop paying per screenshot.
- License
- Apache 2.0 / MIT
- Pricing
- Free
The right answer if the bill is the whole motivation and your team is comfortable owning infrastructure. Be realistic that you are giving up the review workflow, which is the part of Percy that non-engineers used. Details in open source visual regression testing tools.
- No per-screenshot billing at any volume
- No data leaves your CI
- Playwright bundles capture and comparison; reg-suit adds Git-keyed baselines without committing images
- You lose the hosted review UI entirely — this is the biggest functional regression from Percy
- Baselines become your problem, including the platform-specific naming trap
- Determinism work that Percy absorbed is now yours
Best for: Teams who left Percy because maintaining the coverage was the real cost.
- License
- Commercial
- Pricing
- First week free, then paid
This is our product. The reason we mention it in a Percy comparison is the migration shape: because there is no SDK, there is nothing to rip out of your test suite — which is usually the most tedious part of leaving a snapshot-SDK vendor.
- No SDK to migrate — coverage is discovered from the running application, not authored per test
- New routes are covered without anyone adding a snapshot call
- Change targeting recaptures only the routes a pull request can affect
- Reviews arrive as a pull request comment
- Newer than Percy with a smaller integration surface
- Hosted only
- Route-driven rather than component-library focused
Migrating off Percy
- Export what you can. Percy's baselines are not portable between vendors — plan to re-baseline on the new tool rather than migrating images.
- Run both in parallel for two weeks. Keep Percy authoritative while the replacement builds a baseline and you assess its noise level.
- Strip the SDK last.
percySnapshot()calls are scattered through the suite; removing them before the replacement is trusted leaves you with no visual coverage at all. - Re-tune thresholds on the new tool. Do not port your Percy configuration — the comparison algorithms differ, and a threshold tuned for one will be wrong for the other.
- Watch the first redesign. A real intentional change is the honest test of any review workflow. If approving it is painful, you picked wrong.
The determinism work carries over unchanged regardless of destination — fonts, animation, clocks, and live data behave the same way everywhere. How to fix flaky visual tests applies to all of these.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best alternative to Percy?
Argos is the closest like-for-like swap — a hosted review workflow with published pricing at $100/month for 35,000 screenshots. Applitools suits enterprises replacing Percy at scale, and Chromatic is strongest if your coverage can move into Storybook.
Is Percy still available?
Yes. Percy remains available through BrowserStack with a free tier of 5,000 screenshots per month. However, its dedicated pricing page returned a 404 when checked on 13 September 2026 and paid tiers route to sales rather than showing published rates.
How hard is it to migrate off Percy?
The SDK calls are the tedious part — percySnapshot() is typically scattered across a whole suite. Baselines are not portable between vendors, so plan to re-baseline. Run both tools in parallel for about two weeks before removing the Percy integration.
Sources
- Percy by BrowserStack product pagechecked 2026-09-13
- Argos pricingchecked 2026-09-13
- Applitools pricingchecked 2026-09-13
- Chromatic pricingchecked 2026-09-13
- SmartUI by TestMu AIchecked 2026-09-13