Should you deploy Storybook to Netlify?
Thinking of deploying Storybook to Netlify or another website hosting service?
It’s time-consuming to figure out best practices for deploying Storybook. We researched techniques from the Storybook community to make it easier for you to decide.
This article gives you an overview of Chromatic and Netlify. It’s based on our own experiences as Storybook maintainers and also Netlify users (we’re happy users, but for other purposes). Compare features, workflows, and pricing below.
Why do teams deploy Storybook?
Shipping UI means coordinating designers, product managers, QA, and engineers.
Without a shared reference point, feedback gets scattered across outdated artifacts, static screenshots, chat, and task managers. Miscommunication follows.
Teams deploy Storybook so everyone can review the same implementation. Stakeholders can interact with the real UI without checking out code, setting up a dev environment, or waiting for staging to free up. That leads to earlier, more precise feedback.
"Deploying Storybook each PR makes visual review easier and helps product owners think in components." – Norbert de Langen, Storybook steering committee
Website vs component library
Most deployment services specialize in hosting websites and assets. They’re perfect for apps, marketing pages, and blogs. But when you use Storybook, you’re actually building something different: UI components.
The use case for deploying a website is distinct from deploying a component library. With websites, teams review the “whole” user experience. Whereas with component libraries, teams review discrete UI pieces in finer detail. Reviewing at the component level increases feedback precision. Which, in turn, prevents wasting time due to miscommunication.
Popular services designed for website hosting aren’t optimized for UI components. Netlify is great for automated deploy previews and general website infrastructure but lacks workflows for UI components. Our frontend team loves Netlify for projects like static marketing sites.
We built Chromatic for teams shipping UI across apps and design systems. It deploys your Storybook to a secure workspace. From there, every component is indexed and versioned for CI-powered review and testing.
Chromatic surfaces the UI changes that matter between branches and commits. Teams can comment, assign reviewers, and stay aligned on the implementation in front of them.
Integrations with CI and Git
Chromatic integrates with your CI pipeline and Git tools. Each push deploys Storybook to a secure CDN, syncs status back to CI, and adds a badge to the pull request.
Stakeholders get a shareable URL to review the latest UI implementation. No checking out code, fussing with dependencies, or managing a local environment.
Purpose-built for frontend teams
Shipping UIs takes a team. Developers, designers, and product managers must collaborate to create engaging experiences. But sorting through all that feedback is tricky.
There are plenty of generic tools for collaboration (Slack, Zoom, email) and task management (Jira, Asana, GitHub Issues). But none focus on the needs of frontend developers. It's easy to spend more time wrangling feedback than building new features.
Chromatic is for UI development teams. Everyone can take part in the UI review process. Leave comments, assign reviewers, and track implementation progress so developers know exactly what tasks remain to ship UIs. When you’re ready to merge, the process is painless.
Help your team find and reuse your components
Large component libraries often encounter scaling challenges. For instance, duplication, searchability, and documentation... or lack thereof. Questions arise: “where was this used?”, “does this already exist?”, and “what did it use to look like?”
Website-focused deployment solutions like Netlify don’t solve this problem. They're focused on building amazing infrastructure for web apps. Our own team loves using Netlify to deploy static sites. But it's not their job to track component history, UI changes, or interdependencies.
Chromatic extracts your components from Storybook into a searchable UI library that tracks them across branches and commits. Your team can see how components evolve over time and browse existing work to reuse.
Service comparison
Both Netlify and Chromatic can deploy your Storybook. But which deployment method is ideal for UI components and design systems? Here's a quick comparison.
| Specs | Chromatic (by Storybook maintainers) | Netlify |
|---|---|---|
| Made for Storybook | ✅ Yes | No |
| Comment on stories | ✅ Yes | No |
| Assign reviewers | ✅ Yes | No |
| Component history and versions | ✅ Yes | No |
| Access control syncing | ✅ Yes | It depends |
| Integration | ✅ Frequent updates from Storybook core maintainers | You maintain |
| CDN | ✅ Yes | Yes |
| Publish Storybook on commit | ✅ Yes | Yes |
| Git workflow support | ✅ Yes | Yes |
| Price | ✅ Free forever | Yes |
Chromatic is the best Storybook deployment service for most frontend teams. It includes a suite of automated collaboration tools that help developers ship UIs faster. Integrations with Storybook, CI, and Git reduce the ops work around publishing and review.
And Chromatic is free, so there’s no risk in trying it out for yourself.
"Deploying to Chromatic is a no brainer. Host your components with testing and collaboration tools out of the box." –Michael Shilman, Storybook core maintainer
Ready to try Chromatic?
If you use Storybook to build production UIs, Chromatic is for you. Install the addon and deploy your Storybook to a secure workspace in minutes. Free to deploy. No credit card required. Sign up now.