There are hundreds of different controllers and probably thousands of different stepper boards. People have been making both since at least the 1940's. There are plenty of combinations that will not work together.
If you get a modern stepper driver that will accept step forward and step back signals as pulses, then it can be made to work with most controllers. There are plenty of those sort of controllers out there and they are pretty cheap. You want one that a driver that will do micro stepping, so that rules out a lot of the really old stuff. You want a controller that is based on a modern CPU, so that also rules out a bunch of old stuff. I would suggest that you also want an open source based controller. They all seem to do things the same basic way.
So the real answer is that most of the controllers you would actually consider will work with the drivers you would actually consider.
If you get a modern stepper driver that will accept step forward and step back signals as pulses, then it can be made to work with most controllers. There are plenty of those sort of controllers out there and they are pretty cheap. You want one that a driver that will do micro stepping, so that rules out a lot of the really old stuff. You want a controller that is based on a modern CPU, so that also rules out a bunch of old stuff. I would suggest that you also want an open source based controller. They all seem to do things the same basic way.
So the real answer is that most of the controllers you would actually consider will work with the drivers you would actually consider.