Storybook vs Pest

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

Pest / Laravel community · since 2020

• 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.

• Much less boilerplate than raw PHPUnit for the same coverage.
• Architecture testing — enforcing layering rules as tests — is a genuinely useful addition.
• Fully compatible with existing PHPUnit tests, so adoption is incremental.

• 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.

• Another abstraction layer to debug when something goes wrong underneath.
• Strongest in the Laravel world; thinner elsewhere.
• Smaller ecosystem of examples than PHPUnit.

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

Laravel teams and modern PHP projects that find PHPUnit verbose.