👩‍💻 Storybook’s community is thriving

Storybook’s community is its lifeblood and greatest strength. The project revolves around its users, is driven forward by its maintainers, and is sustainable thanks to its sponsors. We’ve seen tremendous growth across the board.

Framework usage flourishing

Storybook has long been a popular choice for React developers, with @storybook/react boasting over 4M monthly NPM downloads. This alone has earned the project over 44,000 stars on Github and made it a category leader in front-end development.

What’s new in 2019 is major growth in Storybook framework sub-communities:

Storybook monthly NPM downloads among in framework sub-communities

It’s thrilling to see these communities gaining critical mass. Leading the pack are Storybook for Vue (309% YTD growth), React Native (168%), Angular (420%), and HTML (893%). This growth translates into a more useful and robust platform. Every time someone adds a feature or fixes a bug it benefits everyone, no matter which framework they choose.

One of the fastest growing open source communities

A project of Storybook’s scale wouldn’t be able to function without the thousands of people who use Storybook, file bugs, help other users, improve code/documentation, offer support and feedback, and otherwise evangelize it to the world.

Thankfully, our user growth has also translated into a flood of new contributors. According to Github’s 2019 State of the Octoverse, Storybook is the 9th fastest growing open source community in the world:

Storybook now has 860+ contributors, hailing from every continent except Antarctica. The team is not only bursting with talent, but comprised of some of the friendliest, most collaborative folks in open source.

New maintainers. Community growth helped us add new project maintainers. Storybook has an “M x N problem” of maintaining hundreds of addons and integrations (M) across dozens of different frameworks (N). Our large community helps keep the project stable and provide user support across all our frameworks, even as the product rapidly evolves.

Better documentation. Community growth has also helped us improve documentation, which is crucial to the project’s success. Storybook’s website got completely overhauled and the new site is a thing of beauty! We also upgraded Learn Storybook, Storybook’s collection of free guides for professional developers, with new tutorials and translations.

New 9 chapter tutorial: Design Systems for Developers

Supported frameworks: React, Vue, Angular, React Native, Svelte

Localizations: English, Español, Português, Nederlands, 简体中文

Sponsors make Storybook sustainable

Finally, Storybook benefits tremendously from sponsorship. We are grateful for an estimated $25,000/yr in open collective donations from companies like Airbnb, Applitools, Facebook, Chromatic, Xebia, and many more.

Corporate stewardship is provided by Chromatic, whose team has provided technical leadership for the project since 2017 and accounted for over half of the commits in 2019.