xUnit.net 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

.NET Foundation · since 2007

Category standard

Chromatic / OSS community · since 2016

• Per-test instance isolation eliminates a whole class of shared-state bugs by design.
• Idiomatic modern C# — no attribute soup.
• The default in current .NET project templates.

• 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.

• Fewer built-in assertions than NUnit; most teams add FluentAssertions.
• The isolation model surprises developers migrating from NUnit.
• Parallelism defaults occasionally bite on integration tests.

• 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.

New .NET projects.

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