# How to Share a Chromatic Build With Reviewers Outside Your Team

Canonical: https://commareports.com/share-chromatic-build
Published: 2026-09-14

> Chromatic builds need a seat and a Chromatic login. Publish the changed stories as a page so designers, PMs and clients can review without being provisioned.

# Share a Chromatic build

Chromatic ran on the PR, diffed 140 stories, and flagged six. The engineering
review is straightforward.

The part that is not straightforward: the design system lead works in a
different org, the PM reviews on a phone, and the client — who is paying for
the redesign — has never heard of Chromatic.

## A published Storybook is not a review

The reflex is "just publish the Storybook". It is the wrong artifact, for a
precise reason: a Storybook shows *what the components are*, and a review needs
*what changed*.

Hand someone a 200-component Storybook and ask whether the new button padding
is right, and they will browse for two minutes and say it looks fine. The six
changed stories were never found. See
[sharing a Storybook static build](/share-storybook-static) for when the full
Storybook *is* the right artifact — a component library reference, not a diff.

## Publish the delta

After the Chromatic build, take the changed stories and assemble a page:

```html
<h1>UI review — PR #331 · Checkout redesign</h1>
<p>6 of 140 stories changed. Chromatic build 1284.</p>

<section>
  <h2>Button / Primary</h2>
  <p>Padding 12px → 16px, per the new spacing scale.</p>
  <div class="pair">
    <figure><img src="…before.png" /><figcaption>Before</figcaption></figure>
    <figure><img src="…after.png" /><figcaption>After</figcaption></figure>
  </div>
</section>
```

The sentence of intent under each heading is what turns a diff into a review.
"Padding 12px → 16px, per the new spacing scale" invites agreement or
disagreement. An unlabelled image pair invites silence.

## Clients are the reason to bother

For an agency this stops being a convenience. You cannot provision a client's
marketing director into your Chromatic project, and you should not want to —
they would see every other project's builds in the sidebar.

A published page with restricted access shows one client one review. It also
gives you a record of what they approved, with their comments attached to the
component they were looking at, which is the artifact that matters when scope
gets litigated later. See [Comma for agencies](/for/agencies).

## Comments where the change is

The value over a Slack thread is anchoring. "The hover state is too dark" next
to the hover state story is actionable; the same sentence in a channel,
referring to one of six changes, generates a round-trip asking which one — see
[commenting on HTML](/comment-on-html).

## Worth knowing

- **Chromatic keeps the baselines.** Accept and deny stay there; the published
  page is for the conversation.
- **Publish from the CI job** after the Chromatic step, so the link is ready
  when the PR opens — see [publishing from CI](/ci).
- **Update the same report per PR.** A force-push should refresh the page, not
  produce a second link.
- **5 MB per report body.**

## Try it

Free — unlimited reports, commenters and revisions.

**[Publish from CI →](/ci)**

### Related

- [Share a Percy visual diff](/share-percy-report) ·
  [Share an Applitools result](/share-applitools-report)
- [Share a Storybook static build](/share-storybook-static) ·
  [Comma for agencies](/for/agencies)
- [Publish from CI](/ci) · [Commenting on HTML](/comment-on-html)