node:test 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

OpenJS Foundation · since 2022

Category standard

Chromatic / OSS community · since 2016

• No dependencies to install, audit or upgrade — a real supply-chain advantage for libraries.
• Stable and versioned with the runtime itself.
• Fast, with parallel execution by file and built-in coverage.

• 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, so it is a poor fit for front-end component testing.
• Ecosystem of reporters and matchers is tiny compared to Jest or Vitest.
• TypeScript requires a loader or a build step.

• 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 and backend services that want a dependency-free test setup.

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