Dungbeetle vs Chromatic

Chromatic is the visual testing cloud from the company that maintains Storybook — component-level visual tests and UI review built around your stories, with Playwright and Cypress end-to-end support no longer limited to Storybook. Dungbeetle is a snapshot and visual regression testing tool — a free CLI plus self-hostable cloud — built for AI agents and the humans they work for. The short verdict: if your team lives in Storybook, Chromatic is the strongest tool in that lane; if you test whole pages or non-web surfaces, or per-snapshot metering makes you nervous, Dungbeetle is the simpler bet.

When Chromatic is the better choice

Honestly: if your component library is your product surface and it's all in Storybook, nothing matches Chromatic.

• It's built by the Storybook maintainers. The integration isn't a plugin — it's the native path. Chromatic also publishes your Storybook so designers and PMs browse the same stories you test.
• TurboSnap analyzes your git history and dependency graph to skip stories with no code changes, and skipped snapshots bill at 1/5th the regular cost (docs).
• Per-component snapshots at story granularity localize a regression to one component instead of one page.
• UI Review is a real collaboration product — assign reviewers, discuss, approve — not just a diff viewer.
• Playwright and Cypress support is GA: Chromatic archives the DOM, styles, and assets during your E2E runs and snapshots those archives, so it's no longer Storybook-only (chromatic.com/playwright).

If that's your world and the snapshot math works out, use Chromatic.

When Dungbeetle is the better choice

• You don't use Storybook. Dungbeetle captures live URLs and full pages directly — a zero-dependency fetch driver or a Playwright driver — and also ingests PNGs your existing Playwright suite already writes (screenshotFile mode). No stories required.
• You test more than the browser. Terminal output, API responses, performance metrics, desktop accessibility trees, and game state (Godot) are first-class capture types, all normalized to reviewable JSON.
• Snapshot-count anxiety. Chromatic bills one snapshot per test per build, multiplied by every browser and every viewport. Dungbeetle's proposed tiers are flat: unlimited seats on every plan, soft caps on paid tiers, and the only overage is storage at $0.10/GB-month — never per-snapshot charges.
• Baselines in your repo. Snapshots are semantic JSON (screenshots additionally pixel-compared with configurable tolerance), so baselines can live in dungbeetle.snapshots/ and get reviewed in ordinary PRs — no server required. A central cloud is optional, not the product.
• Agent-native workflow. Device-flow login for coding agents, scoped revocable tokens, an MCP server (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI), and human-gated baseline promotion — an agent can run the loop but can't approve its own visual changes.

Pricing compared

Chromatic, as of July 2026 (chromatic.com/pricing):

Chromatic plan	Price	Snapshots/mo	Overage
Free	$0	5,000	—
Starter	$179/mo	35,000	$0.008/snapshot
Pro	$399/mo	85,000	$0.008/snapshot
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	—

All Chromatic plans include unlimited projects, users, and parallel runs; the Free tier tests Chrome only, paid tiers add Safari, Firefox, and Edge. The number to watch is the multiplier: per Chromatic's billing docs, each browser and each viewport is a separate billed snapshot. 50 stories × 2 browsers × 2 viewports = 200 snapshots per build — a busy PR week eats 35,000 faster than the sticker price suggests. TurboSnap softens this (unchanged stories bill at 1/5th) but doesn't remove it.

Dungbeetle's managed cloud is in closed beta (free during beta). The GA tiers below are proposed, not final:

Dungbeetle plan (proposed)	Price	Repos	Snapshots/mo	Retention
Free	$0	1	5,000 hard cap	14 days
Starter	$29/mo	5	25,000 soft cap	60 days
Team	$99/mo	25	100,000 soft cap	180 days
Business	$249/mo	Unlimited	—	1 year, SSO

Every plan has unlimited seats; the only overage is storage ($0.10/GB-month), with 2GB included on Free. Details on /pricing. And the CLI with repo-committed baselines is free forever, source-available (FSL-1.1, converting to Apache-2.0 after two years) — $0 covers a lot of teams. Self-hosting the cloud server is an enterprise option (BUSL-1.1, on request).

The workflow difference

Chromatic: push → their cloud builds and renders your stories (or E2E archives) → you review and approve in their web UI. The cloud is the workflow; baselines live there.

Dungbeetle: capture locally or in CI (or ingest screenshots your suite already takes) → semantic JSON diff plus pixel comparison → review either as a plain diff in the PR (dungbeetle.snapshots/ committed to the repo) or in the cloud UI with approve/promote. The cloud is an upgrade, not a prerequisite.

Try it next to your Storybook

Dungbeetle captures URLs, and every Storybook story has one — the same iframe.html?id=<story-id> pattern our Loki migration guide uses:

npx dungbeetle init

// dungbeetle.config.json
{
  "version": 1,
  "project": { "name": "design-system" },
  "lifecycle": {
    "capture": [
      { "kind": "web", "name": "button--primary",
        "driver": "playwright", "screenshot": true,
        "url": "http://localhost:6006/iframe.html?id=button--primary",
        "viewport": { "width": 1366, "height": 768 } }
    ]
  }
}

npx dungbeetle update   # mint baselines → dungbeetle.snapshots/
npx dungbeetle test     # exits non-zero on any visual change

Or skip setup entirely: try the hosted /demo, or diff two URLs with no account at all:

npx dungbeetle anon http://localhost:6006 --compare https://storybook.your-site.example

More: Migrate from Loki (Storybook-adjacent), all migration guides, and pricing.