Storybook vs PHPUnit

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

Sebastian Bergmann · since 2004

• 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.

• Universal in PHP — every framework builds on it.
• Mature mocking, data providers and coverage integration.
• Well documented and extremely stable.

• 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.

• Major versions drop older PHP releases aggressively, forcing upgrade work.
• Verbose compared to newer wrappers such as Pest.
• Coverage requires an extension, which slows runs significantly.

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

Every PHP project, directly or through a wrapper.