JUnit 5 vs Jest

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.

JUnit 5Jest

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

EPL-2.0

MIT

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaKotlin

JavaScriptTypeScript

Platforms

WebAPI

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Category standard

JUnit Team · since 2017

Category standard

OpenJS Foundation · since 2014

Strengths

Universal support across IDEs, build tools and CI in the Java ecosystem.
The extension model replaced JUnit 4's runners and rules with something composable.
Pairs cleanly with Mockito, AssertJ, Spring Test and Testcontainers.

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.

Limitations

Java verbosity persists — expect more lines per test than in Python or JavaScript.
Parallel execution is opt-in and still occasionally surprising.
Mixed JUnit 4 and 5 codebases need the vintage engine and stay confusing for years.

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.

Best for

Every Java and Kotlin project on the JVM.

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

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