Diffy vs Needle

Diffy is a visual regression testing service that captures website pages and compares screenshots to show changes. It can capture pages as logged-in users and test admin pages without requiring code. To help with changing content, users can mock dynamic page elements while checking layout and styles. Diffy detects vertical shifts and provides pixel-perfect comparisons, thumbnails, individual approvals and shareable diff links. AI summaries group changes by type and prioritize them by impact. Listed integrations include GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, Playwright, GitHub pull requests, Zapier, Figma, Slack, webhooks and a Claude skills plugin. Local development integrations include DDEV, Lando and Docksal, and an on-premises installation option is listed. The free plan includes 500 screenshots per month, two environments and one month of data retention. Pro costs $67 a month when billed annually and includes 2,000 screenshots per month, multiple environments, CI automation and six months of retention. CI and API access, custom environments and history beyond one month require a paid plan.

Needle is an open-source Python testing library for checking rendered website visuals and layout. It captures selected page areas and compares them with baseline screenshots, helping identify visual changes in CSS, fonts, images, and SVGs. It also tests calculated CSS values and HTML element positions. Needle works with Selenium and nose, and documentation describes installing it with pip after Selenium. Browser-driver options include remote, PhantomJS, Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari; NeedleFirefox is the default. PIL is the default screenshot engine, with PerceptualDiff and ImageMagick available as alternatives. PerceptualDiff and ImageMagick can create a diff PNG when comparisons fail. Tests can set viewport dimensions for responsive-site checks. Screenshot cleanup after successful tests is optional and disabled by default, while failed-comparison screenshots remain available. Package metadata describes the project as operating-system independent and for developers, while the listed platform is Linux. The repository uses a BSD license. PyPI lists version 0.5.0, released April 2, 2017, as the latest release. Needle is free and has no paid plan.