Storybook vs Vitest

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

VoidZero / OSS community · since 2021

• 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.

• Fastest watch-mode feedback of the JavaScript runners, by a wide margin on large repos.
• Zero-config ESM and TypeScript — the single biggest source of Jest configuration pain simply disappears.
• Jest-compatible API means migration is usually a day, not a quarter.

• 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.

• Assumes Vite. On a Webpack or Metro project the advantage largely evaporates.
• Younger ecosystem; a handful of niche Jest plugins have no equivalent.
• Browser mode is still maturing relative to a dedicated component test runner.

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

Any Vite-based project, and most new JavaScript projects generally.