head to head · open source
storybook vs yard
storybook has 91,428 GitHub stars, 10,495 forks, 1,831 open issues and last shipped yesterday. yard has 2,011 stars, 435 forks, 14 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. storybook leads on adoption by 4,446% (91,428 vs 2,011 stars). storybook is written in TypeScript under MIT; yard is written in Ruby under MIT. storybook has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, yard 22%. storybook was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (documentation), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| storybook | yard | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 91K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-08-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 10K | ⑂ 435 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick storybook if
- You weight community size — 91K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick yard if
- You want the yard feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and yard fits your workflow better
About storybook
Build bulletproof UI components faster Storybook is a frontend workshop for building UI components and pages in isolation. Thousands of teams use it for UI development, testing, and documentation. Find out more at storybook.js.org ! View README for: Table of contents 🚀 Getting Started 📒 Projects 🛠 Supported Frameworks & Examples 🔗Addons 🏅 Badges & Presentation materials 👥 Community 👏 Contributing 👨💻 Development scripts 💸 Sponsors 💵 Backers :memo: License Getting Started Visit Storybook's website to learn more about Storybook and to get started. Documentation Documentation can be found on Storybook's…
read the full storybook overview →
About yard
YARD: Yay! A Ruby Documentation Tool Synopsis YARD is a documentation generation tool for the Ruby programming language. It enables the user to generate consistent, usable documentation that can be exported to a number of formats very easily, and also supports extending for custom Ruby constructs such as custom class level definitions. Below is a summary of some of YARD's notable features. Feature List 1. Builtin RDoc/Markdown Hybrid Support : YARD ships with a builtin markup renderer that supports both RDoc and Markdown formatting out of the box—no external gem required. You can freely mix RDoc style and…
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Frequently asked questions
Is storybook or yard more popular?
storybook has 91,428 GitHub stars and yard has 2,011. storybook has the larger community by that measure.
Are storybook and yard free?
Both are open source. storybook is licensed under MIT and yard under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between storybook and yard?
storybook is written in TypeScript and yard in Ruby. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, storybook or yard?
Choose storybook if you want the larger community (91,428 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose yard if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.