Encode may help in the utf8 case, but not in the case of different integer representation (as mentioned in the Storable manpage):

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Data::Compare qw();
use Storable qw(nfreeze);
use Test::More qw(no_plan);

my $data1 = { foobar => 1 };
my $data2 = { foobar => "1" };

$Storable::canonical = 1;

is_deeply($data1, $data2, "is_deeply test");
ok(Data::Compare::Compare($data1, $data2), "Data::Compare");
ok(nfreeze($data1) eq nfreeze($data2), "storable serialized");
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