pixelcoords vs SikuliX
Different categories with one honest overlap: both use template matching to find things on screen.
The short version
SikuliX is a complete visual automation runtime — it watches the screen, scripts decisions, and drives your mouse and keyboard, with an IDE and OCR built in. pixelcoords deliberately does none of that: it never clicks anything. It produces the ground truth automation consumes — human-marked regions as exact coordinates, with verification (assert) and drift re-location (find) using the same template-matching idea, scoped to regions you marked. If you want one tool to both see and act, that's SikuliX's category. If you already have a stack that acts — pyautogui, xdotool, a computer-use agent — pixelcoords is the measurement half, without a JVM. Worth knowing when comparing: SikuliX's original development was archived in early 2026 and continues under the OculiX fork.
Feature for feature
| Feature | pixelcoords | SikuliX |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Platforms | macOS · Windows · Linux | macOS · Windows · Linux (JVM)requires Java; development archived, continued by the OculiX fork |
| What you get out | session.json + labeled crops + cutouts + click codephysical-pixel coordinates in three spaces, per-monitor DPI scale | Automation scripts that act on the screen |
| Live on-screen measuring | not offered | Watches the live screen continuously |
| OCR | not offered | Built in (Tesseract) |
| Point verification | assert — exit codes for CI and agents | In-script image matching |
| Re-location after UI drift | find — template re-location with deltas | Continuous visual search |
| License | MIT, open source | MIT, open source |
When to pick SikuliX
- You want a self-contained see-and-act automation environment with its own scripting and IDE.
- You need OCR in the same tool — a pixelcoords non-goal, stated in the open.
- Continuous visual search across the whole screen is the job, not marked regions.
When to pick pixelcoords
- Your automation stack already exists and needs trustworthy coordinates, not another runtime.
- You want one small native binary — no JVM, no Java versions.
- CI needs exit codes: assert scores points against human-marked ground truth.
- You want the marking itself to be first-class: five shape tools, labels, crops, editable saved sessions.
Thirty seconds of pixelcoords
What happens in this demo
A private browser window on the Google homepage is frozen by pixelcoords with an amber outline marking the targeted window. Four shapes are drawn over the page — a rectangle, an ellipse, a triangle, and a hexagon — in committed green, then a freehand region in preview blue with the live coordinate chip showing its position and size. The control panel lists every key. The session is saved, and the demo ends on the resulting session.json open in a browser: schema, monitors, target window, and one record per marked selection.
Two ways in
cargo install pixelcoordsOr skip the toolchain: prebuilt binaries for macOS, Windows, and Linux — download, unpack, run.