Storybook vs Cypress

Free and open source

From $75 per month (Cloud, entry team plan)

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

You only pay for Cypress Cloud. Costs scale with recorded test results, so a large suite on every PR is the expensive shape.

Everything, self-hosted

The test runner is free forever. Cypress Cloud free tier covers a limited number of recorded test results per month.

Category standard

Chromatic / OSS community · since 2016

Category standard

Cypress.io · since 2017

• 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.

• The interactive runner is the best onboarding experience in E2E testing; a new developer writes a passing test in minutes.
• Excellent documentation and one of the largest plugin ecosystems.
• Component testing and E2E in one tool with one config.

• 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.

• Runs in the same event loop as your app, which historically meant no multi-tab, multi-origin or iframe-heavy testing without workarounds. Support has improved but the model still constrains you.
• JavaScript and TypeScript only.
• Meaningful parallelisation effectively requires paying for Cypress Cloud.

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

Front-end teams who value developer experience and live in a single-origin JavaScript app.