Storybook vs pytest

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

pytest-dev · 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.

• Fixtures are the best dependency-injection model in any test framework, and they compose cleanly.
• Assertion introspection produces genuinely useful failure output from a plain assert.
• Vast plugin ecosystem — pytest-xdist, pytest-cov, pytest-asyncio, pytest-django.

• 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.

• Fixture scope and ordering become genuinely hard to reason about in large suites.
• The magic that makes simple cases elegant makes complex cases opaque.
• Python only.

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

Essentially every Python project.