AVA vs Vitest

Free and open source

Free and open source

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Established

OSS community · since 2015

Category standard

VoidZero / OSS community · since 2021

• 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.

• Fastest watch-mode feedback of the JavaScript runners, by a wide margin on large repos.
• Zero-config ESM and TypeScript — the single biggest source of Jest configuration pain simply disappears.
• Jest-compatible API means migration is usually a day, not a quarter.

• No DOM environment; not for front-end work.
• No built-in mocking or snapshots comparable to Jest.
• Smaller community than the mainstream runners.

• Assumes Vite. On a Webpack or Metro project the advantage largely evaporates.
• Younger ecosystem; a handful of niche Jest plugins have no equivalent.
• Browser mode is still maturing relative to a dedicated component test runner.

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

Any Vite-based project, and most new JavaScript projects generally.