Storybook vs Jest

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

Category standard

OpenJS Foundation · since 2014

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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