Storybook vs AVA

Free and open source

Free and open source

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

Chromatic / OSS community · since 2016

Established

OSS community · since 2015

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

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