ExUnit vs Pest
ExUnit
hexdocs.pm
Pest
pestphp.comSide by side
| Figure | ExUnit | Pest |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Unit Testing Frameworks | 8.3 (#4) | 8.2 (#7) |
| Spec score · Unit Testing | 8.2 (#6) | 8.3 (#5) |
| Intended users | The Elixir website describes Elixir as serving solo developers and Fortune 500 companies across varied industries and applications. | The maker describes Pest as a testing framework for PHP developers and AI agents. |
| Purpose | ExUnit is a unit testing framework for Elixir. | Pest is a PHP testing framework for developers and AI agents. |
Plans
In their own words
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 Its maintainers say bug fixes for outdated major versions are available for 12 months after the latest version's release, without a guaranteed resolution time or fix for every issue.