Everything people ask before they sign up.
If your question is not here, ask us — the answer usually ends up on this page.
The product itself.
What does Side By Side actually do?
It renders the pages of your site in a real browser, at the screen widths you care about, and stores those renders as a baseline. Later — on a schedule, after a deploy, or whenever you press the button — it renders the same pages again and compares each image with the baseline pixel by pixel.
You get a diff percentage per page and viewport, an image showing which regions changed, and a list of JavaScript console errors collected while the page loaded. You then review the changes and mark them as real regressions, intentional content changes, or false positives.
How do I find out something changed? Do I have to keep checking?
No — we email you. When a run reaches a terminal state, everyone in your organisation who has the matching preference on gets one email saying the run finished (which site, which run, completed, partial or failed, how many screenshots were compared, how many differences were found, and a link into the run). If the run actually reported at least one difference, a second email follows listing the largest changes by page and viewport.
A run that found nothing sends no difference alert, and a failed run sends the run-finished mail once for the run rather than one message per broken URL, so the alert keeps meaning something. Both preferences live on your Account page, both are on by default, both are honoured, and every message carries a one-click unsubscribe. Neither is gated by plan — being told is the product, so Free gets it too.
What we do not have, so you are not left waiting for it: no outgoing webhooks, no Slack integration, and no email warning you that you are nearing a plan limit — the usage page inside the app is the only place that number lives, and nothing warns you at 80%. For anything beyond those two emails, poll the REST API.
What counts as one screenshot?
One rendering of one URL at one viewport width. Thirty tracked URLs across three viewport presets is 90 screenshots per run.
Things that do not count against your allowance: console-only checks (no images are captured), viewing or re-reviewing existing results, exporting your account data, and AI analyses (those are metered separately). A single-URL retake counts as one screenshot; a homepage thumbnail counts as one.
Do I need to install anything or change my site?
No. There is nothing to install on your site, no snippet, no plugin, no SDK in a test suite. We fetch your pages the same way a visitor's browser would.
The optional Chrome extension is for you, not for your site: it shows whether the page you are browsing is tracked and lets you record interactions.
How do you handle pages that change constantly — carousels, news feeds, ads?
Three ways, and you will normally use all three. First, comparison is shift-tolerant: content that simply moved down the page is detected as displacement rather than reported as a wall of red. Second, you can record pre-screenshot actions — dismiss the cookie banner, stop the carousel, scroll to a stable point — so every run starts from the same state. Third, you mark a result as a false positive or an intentional content change once, and it stops competing for your attention.
Can it test staging, or a site behind a VPN or a password?
Yes. Each site can have several environments — typically production, staging and dev — with their own URL, their own HTTP authentication and their own SOCKS5 proxy. An environment can also explicitly opt out of the site's default proxy.
Per-environment HTTP auth and VPN/SOCKS5 reach are included on every plan, including Free and the trial. They are never gated, so you can point Side By Side at a VPN-only staging host and see it working before you pay us anything.
What does the AI analysis do, and can I turn it off?
It looks at the baseline image, the current image and the generated diff and writes a short judgement: whether the change looks like a genuine layout regression, an intentional content edit, or rendering noise. It is triage — it sorts the review queue, it does not replace your review.
An analysis only runs when one is asked for — nothing is sent in the background without an analysis being triggered. AI is also a plan capability: on a plan without it the platform refuses to run one, so no image leaves our infrastructure at all.
And yes, you can turn it off completely yourself. Any admin of your organisation can disable AI analysis for the whole organisation under Configs → AI, on every plan including Free. It is not a paid feature, and it overrides the plan: while it is off we refuse every analysis on the server — manual, automatic after a comparison, queued, or started through the API — before any image leaves the platform. Each change to the switch is written to the audit log on every plan; reading the audit log in the app is itself an Agency-and-above capability, so on Free, Starter or Studio the entry is recorded but you will not see it on screen. Whether analysis runs automatically after every comparison is a separate platform-wide setting we operate, and it can only ever turn analysis off, never on.
Can I run it from CI as well?
Yes, from the Agency plan onwards: create an API key and have your pipeline enqueue a comparison run after a deploy. It is a complement to scheduled runs, not the primary way the product is meant to be used.
Money questions.
Is the free plan really free, and what do I get?
Permanently free, no card. It gives you 1 site, 1 user, 100 screenshots per 30 days and a minimum of 7 days of run retention, with the same comparison engine as every paid plan.
What it does not include is scheduled runs, the REST API, the audit log and AI analysis — the four gates the platform actually enforces. The action recorder, VPN/SOCKS5 reach and per-environment HTTP auth are never gated, so Free gets all three.
How does the 14-day trial work?
Sign up with an email address and a password, verify the address, and your organisation starts a 14-day trial with Agency-level capabilities and tighter limits. No credit card, no sales call, and nothing is charged when it ends.
On day 15 you either subscribe or drop to the Free plan. Your runs stay where they are — we delete nothing at trial expiry, and there is no automated deletion afterwards either.
What happens when I hit a limit?
New jobs that would exceed your screenshot or AI allowance are refused server-side with a message telling you exactly which limit you hit. We never silently bill overage.
Site and seat limits behave the same way: creating the extra site or inviting the extra teammate is refused server-side with a clear explanation, not quietly allowed and invoiced later.
Two things we do not do yet, so you are not surprised: we send no 80% or 100% warning email — the usage page in your dashboard is the only place that number lives — and there are no add-ons to buy, so raising a limit means changing plan.
How does billing, proration and cancellation work?
Subscriptions are monthly or annual, in EUR or USD, charged by Stripe. Annual is two months free. Changing plan mid-period is prorated by Stripe: an upgrade is charged pro rata straight away, a downgrade credits the unused part against your next invoice.
You can cancel yourself at any time from the billing page. Access continues until the end of the period you have already paid for, then the organisation moves to the Free plan. See the Terms for the refund policy.
What if a payment fails?
Stripe retries the payment on its normal schedule and we show a banner in the dashboard telling you what is happening. During that grace period the product keeps working. If the payment ultimately fails, the organisation is restricted rather than deleted, and everything comes back the moment the card is fixed.
Do you handle VAT, and can I get a proper invoice?
Prices are shown excluding VAT. EU business customers with a valid VAT number are invoiced under the reverse-charge rules; consumers and customers without a VAT number are charged VAT where applicable. Every payment produces a downloadable invoice carrying your company details.
Card details are entered on Stripe's own payment page. We never see or store them.
Where your data goes.
How long do you keep my runs and screenshots?
Straight answer: we do not delete them automatically at all today. There is no retention reaper in the platform — not on a schedule, not on read. Your runs and screenshots stay until you delete them, or until you delete the organisation.
The retention figure on each plan is therefore a minimum commitment — the window we promise to keep data available for — and not a promise that anything disappears at the end of it:
- Free — 7 days
- Starter — 30 days
- Studio — 3 months
- Agency — 6 months
- Scale — 6 months
Cancelling does not delete anything either: the organisation drops to the Free plan and its history stays. When you do want it gone, the account page runs a self-serve deletion — a 7-day grace period during which you can cancel it, then the organisation, its users, runs and images are permanently removed. The one thing that is pruned on a schedule is the audit log, which is kept for at least 30 days and at most a year.
Who can see my screenshots?
The members of your organisation, and nobody else's. Every site belongs to exactly one organisation and every read is checked against that on the server. Screenshot files are not publicly listable or guessable.
There is no public share link — that feature does not exist, so there is no way to expose a run outside your organisation. The one route out is AI diff analysis, and only for the specific result being analysed.
Where is the data stored, and who else processes it?
Account data, run metadata and screenshot images are stored on our hosting infrastructure; the exact provider and region are named in the sub-processor list, which also names our payment processor and the AI provider used for diff analysis. We commit to announcing sub-processor changes before they take effect.
Can I export everything and delete my account myself?
Yes, on every plan including Free, without contacting us. Export produces your organisation's account data, sites, URLs and run metadata in a machine-readable form. Deletion removes the organisation, its users, its runs and its images after a 7-day grace period, during which you can cancel the request.
Do you hold a security certification?
No — we hold no third-party security certification today, and we will not imply otherwise. What we do instead is publish exactly how the system handles your data: isolation between organisations, encryption in transit, how environment credentials are stored, what leaves our infrastructure and when, and how to turn the AI processing off entirely. That is all in the security section of our privacy policy.
If you need a security questionnaire completed for procurement, send it to us and we will fill it in honestly.
What about downtime?
We do not publish an availability figure or offer a contractual service-level commitment on the self-serve plans, because we will not promise a number we cannot back with credits and monitoring. A missed scheduled run is retried; queued jobs survive a restart. Contractual service levels are part of a Scale conversation.