Storybook vs Testing Library

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

OSS community · since 2018

• 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.

• Tests survive refactors because they assert on user-visible output, not internals.
• Accessible-role queries push teams towards accessible markup as a side effect.
• One idiom across every major front-end framework.

• 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.

• Deliberately makes implementation-detail testing hard, which frustrates teams used to shallow rendering.
• Async utilities and act() warnings are a common source of confusion.
• Needs a runner and a DOM environment alongside it.

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

Any front-end team writing component tests, regardless of framework.