Minitest vs Pest
Minitest
github.com
Pest
pestphp.comSide by side
| Figure | Minitest | Pest |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Unit Testing | 8.0 (#10) | 8.3 (#5) |
| Spec score · Unit Testing Frameworks | 8.0 (#12) | 8.2 (#7) |
| Integrations | The README lists Rails, Rake, Nokogiri, and RDoc among projects using Minitest. | Pest's team-maintained plugins include Faker, Laravel, and Livewire. |
| Purpose | Minitest provides testing facilities for TDD, BDD, and benchmarking. | Pest is a PHP testing framework for developers and AI agents. |
| Security | The opened project page does not state a security certification or compliance standard. | The homepage shows a security architecture testing preset, but the opened maker pages did not state a security certification or compliance standard. |
| Support | The repository links to GitHub Issues for bug reports. | Pest's maintainers say they cannot guarantee a fixed bug resolution time or a fix for every issue; bug fixes for outdated versions are available for 12 months after the latest version's release. |
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 Its maintainers say bug fixes for outdated major versions are available for 12 months after the latest version's release, without a guaranteed resolution time or fix for every issue.