AVA vs Pest

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

AVAPest

Entry price

Free and open source

Open source

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

MIT

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScript

PHP

Platforms

API

WebAPI

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartup

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market

Adoption

Established

OSS community · since 2015

Widely used

Pest / Laravel community · since 2020

Strengths

Process isolation catches hidden coupling between tests that other runners hide.
Concurrent by default, so suites stay fast without configuration.
Clean, small API with no magic globals.

Much less boilerplate than raw PHPUnit for the same coverage.
Architecture testing — enforcing layering rules as tests — is a genuinely useful addition.
Fully compatible with existing PHPUnit tests, so adoption is incremental.

Limitations

Best for

Node libraries where test isolation and speed matter more than ecosystem breadth.

Laravel teams and modern PHP projects that find PHPUnit verbose.

All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.