AVA vs Storybook

Free and open source

Free and open source

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Storybook itself is free. Chromatic, the hosted visual-review service from the same team, is a separate paid product.

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Established

OSS community · since 2015

Category standard

Chromatic / OSS community · since 2016

• Process isolation catches hidden coupling between tests that other runners hide.
• Concurrent by default, so suites stay fast without configuration.
• Clean, small API with no magic globals.

• One artefact serves as documentation, visual baseline and interaction test.
• Design-system teams get a shared reference that designers can actually open.
• Rich addon ecosystem for accessibility, viewport and state manipulation.

• No DOM environment; not for front-end work.
• No built-in mocking or snapshots comparable to Jest.
• Smaller community than the mainstream runners.

• Meaningful configuration and maintenance overhead; a neglected Storybook rots fast.
• Build times on large component libraries get long.
• Stories drift from production usage unless discipline is enforced.

Node libraries where test isolation and speed matter more than ecosystem breadth.

Teams maintaining a design system or a large shared component library.