Percy vs Selenium
Percy
percy.io
Selenium
selenium.devSide by side
| Figure | Percy | Selenium |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $199/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 1 |
| Spec score · Testing And Qa | 8.2 (#11) | 8.5 (#8) |
| Spec score · Software Testing Tools | 8.2 (#12) | 8.4 (#10) |
| Spec score · GUI Testing Software | 8.1 (#14) | 8.4 (#10) |
| Founded | 2011 | 2004 |
| Purpose | Percy automates visual testing by capturing DOM snapshots and assets, rendering them across browsers, and comparing them with prior snapshots to detect visual changes. | Selenium is a suite of tools for automating web browsers, primarily for testing web applications. |
| Security | BrowserStack states that it is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and that this compliance extends to its data centers and platform. | The Grid guide warns that Grid must be protected from external access with appropriate firewall permissions because exposure can allow access to infrastructure, internal apps and files, or custom binary execution. |
Plans
Percy
- FreeFree
- Desktop$199 a month
- Desktop & Mobile$599 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
Percy
Percy automates visual testing by capturing DOM snapshots and assets, rendering them across browsers, and comparing results with earlier snapshots to flag visual changes. Responsive checks use configurable widths, while snapshot stabilization freezes animations and other dynamic elements to reduce false positives. Percy groups snapshots into the same build when tests run in separate processes or on different machines. Its review workflow includes status updates, notifications, comments, comparisons, and automatic diff matching. Listed integrations include GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Storybook, WebdriverIO, and Jenkins. Documented frameworks include Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, Puppeteer, Ember, Appium, and others. Percy documentation describes testing across real devices and desktop and mobile browsers. The free plan includes 5,000 screenshots per month, unlimited users, and unlimited projects. Desktop costs $199 a month, billed annually, for 10,000 screenshots per month; Desktop & Mobile costs $599 a month, billed annually, for 25,000 screenshots per month. Paid plans have fixed screenshot allowances, and additional usage is charged at the overage rate. Enterprise pricing is custom and unlisted.
Selenium
Selenium is a free suite of tools for automating web browsers, primarily to test web applications. WebDriver provides language bindings for controlling browsers locally or remotely, and is a W3C Recommendation. The main project supports.NET/C#, Ruby, Java, Python, and JavaScript. Selenium IDE is a browser add-on for recording and replaying interactions in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. For distributed tests, Selenium Grid spreads work across machines and combinations of browsers and operating systems. Grid offers Standalone, Hub and Node, and Distributed configurations; Docker and Kubernetes deployment resources are also linked. Selenium Manager can discover, download, and cache browser releases and drivers. Documentation covers browser-specific functionality for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, and names GitHub Actions and Jenkins as CI/CD examples. Selenium began in 2004 at ThoughtWorks in Chicago. Grid has no authentication by default, and the project advises restricting external access and placing it behind a secure network. The latest Opera driver functionality is not supported, and that driver is officially unsupported. Selenium costs nothing.