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Catch2 vs Pest

Catch2

github.com

Pest

pestphp.com

Side by side

FigureCatch2Pest
Price from—Free
Free plan—Yes
Free trial——
Open source——
WindowsYesYes
macOSYesYes
LinuxYesYes
Self-hosted—Yes
Plans published01
Spec score · Unit Testing6.1 (#26)8.3 (#5)

Plans

Catch2

No plans published.

Catch2 pricing →

Pest

  • PestFree

Pest pricing →

In their own words

Catch2

Catch2 has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.

Visit github.com

Pest

Pest is a free PHP testing framework for developers and AI agents, installed in a PHP project as a Composer development dependency. Pest 5 requires PHP 8.4 or later. It supports parallel execution, coverage, mutation and snapshot testing, profiling, architectural testing and browser testing. Its Browser plugin uses Playwright for page interactions, while the Agent plugin lets coding agents run one-off application checks and can drive a real browser when the Browser plugin is installed. Pest Evals combines deterministic tests with AI-powered scorers for evaluating LLM output. The Tia Engine reruns tests affected by recent changes and requires PCOV or Xdebug as a coverage driver. Pest 5 includes PHPStan and Rector plugins; team-maintained plugins include Faker, Laravel and Livewire. JetBrains maintains the PhpStorm plugin, included by default since version 2023.3. Pest supports parameterized cases but does not include built-in mocks. Its maintainers say bug fixes for outdated major versions are available for 12 months after the latest version's release, without a guaranteed resolution time or fix for every issue.

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