Pest vs QUnit
Pest
pestphp.com
QUnit
qunitjs.comSide by side
| Figure | Pest | QUnit |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Unit Testing | 8.3 (#5) | 8.4 (#3) |
| Spec score · Unit Testing Frameworks | 8.2 (#7) | 8.3 (#6) |
| Integrations | Pest's team-maintained plugins include Faker, Laravel, and Livewire. | Documented browser automation integrations include Karma, Web Test Runner, Testem, WebdriverIO, and TestCafe. |
| Intended users | The maker describes Pest as a testing framework for PHP developers and AI agents. | QUnit is intended for developers testing JavaScript in the environment where the code runs, including browsers, workers, and servers. |
| Purpose | Pest is a PHP testing framework for developers and AI agents. | QUnit is a JavaScript testing framework originally developed for jQuery and now used by JavaScript libraries and applications. |
| Support | Pest's maintainers say they cannot guarantee a fixed bug resolution time or a fix for every issue; bug fixes for outdated versions are available for 12 months after the latest version's release. | The project directs users to GitHub issues, Stack Overflow, and its Matrix chat room for questions and help. |
| Testing features | Pest lists parallel execution, browser testing, profiling, architectural testing, coverage, mutation testing, and optional plugins among its features. | Its guides cover test modules, asynchronous tests, DOM fixtures, asynchronous callbacks, and assertions. |
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.
QUnit
QUnit is a free JavaScript testing framework first developed for the jQuery project. It runs in web browsers, Node.js, SpiderMonkey and Web Worker threads, so developers can test code in different runtime environments. Its APIs allow custom assertions, test runners and reporters. Browser releases have no runtime dependencies, and the project describes Node.js setup as requiring zero configuration and browser setup as minimal. For DOM tests, QUnit resets fixture markup after each test. Its browser reporter presents results and can include expected and actual values, assertion details and failure stack traces. Developers can rerun selected tests or modules and prioritize previously failing tests. Guides cover modules, asynchronous tests, callbacks and assertions, while plugins can add or modify capabilities such as DOM assertions, themes and JUnit XML reports. QUnit integrates with browser automation tools including Karma, Web Test Runner, Testem and WebdriverIO’s QUnit service. QUnit 3.0 is distributed through the jQuery CDN and npm, and is also installable with Yarn. For its ESM version, the compatibility guide lists Node.js 18+ and specified browser versions.