what's the difference between looks-same and pixelmatch?

[FishBlanche]

what's the difference between looks-same and pixelmatch?

[KuznetsovRoman]

Color comparison

• looks-same is using CIEDE2000 color difference
• pixelmatch is using YIQ NTSC transmission color space

CIEDE2000 is much closer to human color perception, so with pixelmatch you would have weird comparison results (described in mapbox/pixelmatch#127)

Antialiasing

• looks-same has configurable antialiasingTolerance
• pixelmatch has some antialiasing tolerance, but its not configurable, therefore could not be adjusted to your needs

Ignore caret

• looks-same has ignoreCaret option
• pixelmatch: "this is the type of thing that should be handled outside of pixelmatch" (Is there a way to ignore caret on input boxes while comparing two images? mapbox/pixelmatch#59 (comment))

Boilerplate

• looks-same has no boilerplate: you can pass imageBuffer or imagePath to a function and that's it
• pixelmatch forces you to write some bulky code (assuming you are using it in Node.js): https://www.npmjs.com/package/pixelmatch#user-content-nodejs

Environment

• looks-same is Node.js only solution (because it uses libvips under the hood)
• pixelmatch can be used in browsers

Conclusion

If you need to run your code in some browser, you should use pixelmatch.
If you need configurable antialiasingTolerance and ignoreCaret options (it is usefull to compare screenshots), or if you want to compare images considering human color perception, you should use looks-same