Show HN: Lost Pixel – open-source visual regression testing for your frontend (opens in new tab)

We don’t at the moment differentiate, but it is definitely a feature on the roadmap. There are multiple ways to solve this and we are considering quite some of them:

1. Grayscaling browser before screenshot 2. Using custom diffing engines that enable for ignoring regions like odiff 3. Trying to be smart and analyzing images with machine learning to identify how meaningful the difference is (moonshot but worth exploring)

Our approach to this in general is that if false positive like this happens we can just batch approve all the differences and be ok with that as it was a subtle rendering change not dependent on us or our direct third party dependencies.

Did you look at Applitools? https://applitools.com/

Their system has a way to demarcate volatile sections.

hey! Absolutely, Lost Pixel is designed to be able to test anything which can be opened in a browser window. So any technology and configuration should be quite flexible to be tested as long as the host is publicly accessible from your runner of lost-pixel engine. So in your case if you can run your environment somewhere and point lost-pixel there it should work as expected! Feel free to reach out if you need help - we are happy to chat and assist you! Github discussions or @divdev_ or @chriskalmar on twitter are both good ways to reach us!

Visual regression tests rock! Be sure to ping me (@divdev_ on twitter) when you will be doing that - would be very eager to pair with you on this and help you set everything up!

Hey! Thanks for the nice words, yes we do - thresholds is indispensable part of Lost Pixel, after all we don’t want to battle the tests which are 2-3 pixels different, those should pass by default.

We are not backed by any VC - just indie hacking that's the greatest prerequisite to comparing ourselves to Chromatic. At the SaaS level we want to bring value to the community by:

1. allowing visual regression testing integration in any part of your flow(locally for free, paid on the platform) with any need for visual testing(stories, pages, components, cypress, playwright). Chromatic is focused on building upon their fundament - storybook. 2. making it affordable. Everybody agrees to one thing - the prices to visual tests are bonkers when it comes to SaaS. We embraced the fact that people want flexible and cheap as much as they want fast and expensive. We will allow to run actual engine on your premises making our pricing significantly cheaper, we will allow storing images on your side which will again make it ridiculously cheap for you as you won't be paying markup that we otherwise could induce on those things. 3. not being protective of our codebase for core part of the offer. We want community to build the top-notch visual regression testing engine with us to serve the community!

Hope it sheds some light into bigger picture, otherwise Chris & I will definitely add the table for comparison with Chromatic & Percy. this is very legit point, thank you!