Mocha 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.

MochaPest

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

WebAPI

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market

Adoption

Widely used

OpenJS Foundation · since 2011

Widely used

Pest / Laravel community · since 2020

Strengths

Small, stable and predictable — it does one job and has done it the same way for years.
Pick your own assertions, mocks and coverage rather than accepting a bundle.
Excellent async and reporter support.

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.js services where you want explicit control over every part of the test stack.

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.