Vitest vs Storybook

Free and open source

Free and open source

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Storybook itself is free. Chromatic, the hosted visual-review service from the same team, is a separate paid product.

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

VoidZero / OSS community · since 2021

Category standard

Chromatic / OSS community · since 2016

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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