Testing Library 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

OSS community · since 2018

Category standard

Chromatic / OSS community · since 2016

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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