Ladle vs. Storybook: Measuring performance across project sizes

Storybook has become an essential tool in frontend projects for enhancing development speed, code quality, and design integration, but its performance, particularly the speed of its internal server, is seen as a drawback. Ladle, developed by Uber, emerges as a promising alternative, boasting significant performance improvements over Storybook by utilizing Vite and esbuild. Benchmarks highlight Ladle's superior speed, especially in large projects, though the tests were conducted on a very large project with over 250 stories, which may not represent all frontend projects. The article extends these benchmarks by evaluating Ladle and Storybook across various project sizes, measuring metrics such as cold and hot startup times, reload times, and build sizes. The findings suggest that while Ladle consistently outperforms Storybook across different project sizes, the most noticeable performance gains occur in larger projects. Despite methodological limitations and the need for manual tool installation, the experiment reinforces Ladle's advantage in performance, making it a compelling choice for projects seeking faster development experiences.