Jest 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

Category standard

OpenJS Foundation · since 2014

Category standard

VoidZero / OSS community · since 2021

• Everything in one dependency, with defaults that work for most projects on day one.
• The largest ecosystem of matchers, reporters and framework presets in JavaScript.
• Snapshot testing is genuinely useful for serialisable output when used with restraint.

• 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.

• Native ESM support remains awkward, and the Babel transform layer is a recurring configuration tax.
• Noticeably slower than Vitest on large suites.
• jsdom is not a browser; subtle DOM and CSS behaviour differs from reality.

• 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.

Existing JavaScript codebases, React Native, and teams that value ecosystem depth over raw speed.

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