Storybook vs Mocha

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

Widely used

OpenJS Foundation · since 2011

• 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.

• Small, stable and predictable — it does one job and has done it the same way for years.
• Pick your own assertions, mocks and coverage rather than accepting a bundle.
• Excellent async and reporter support.

• 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 built-in mocking, snapshots, coverage or parallel-by-default execution.
• Assembling and documenting the stack is work every new project repeats.
• Fewer new projects adopt it; momentum sits with Vitest and Jest.

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

Node.js services where you want explicit control over every part of the test stack.