RSpec 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

Widely used

RSpec Team · since 2005

Category standard

Chromatic / OSS community · since 2016

• The output reads as documentation of intended behaviour.
• Shared examples and contexts keep large Rails suites organised.
• Deep integration with the Rails ecosystem — Capybara, FactoryBot, VCR.

• 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.

• Deeply nested contexts with let and before hooks become very hard to follow.
• The DSL is a language of its own to learn.
• Rails suites tend towards slowness; expect to invest in parallelisation.

• 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.

Ruby and Rails applications.

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