Jest 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

Category standard

OpenJS Foundation · since 2014

Category standard

Chromatic / OSS community · since 2016

• Everything in one dependency, with defaults that work for most projects on day one.
• The largest ecosystem of matchers, reporters and framework presets in JavaScript.
• Snapshot testing is genuinely useful for serialisable output when used with restraint.

• 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.

• Native ESM support remains awkward, and the Babel transform layer is a recurring configuration tax.
• Noticeably slower than Vitest on large suites.
• jsdom is not a browser; subtle DOM and CSS behaviour differs from reality.

• 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.

Existing JavaScript codebases, React Native, and teams that value ecosystem depth over raw speed.

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