PHPUnit 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

Sebastian Bergmann · since 2004

Category standard

Chromatic / OSS community · since 2016

• Universal in PHP — every framework builds on it.
• Mature mocking, data providers and coverage integration.
• Well documented and extremely stable.

• 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.

• Major versions drop older PHP releases aggressively, forcing upgrade work.
• Verbose compared to newer wrappers such as Pest.
• Coverage requires an extension, which slows runs significantly.

• 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.

Every PHP project, directly or through a wrapper.

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