Mocha vs Testing Library

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

Widely used

OpenJS Foundation · since 2011

Category standard

OSS community · since 2018

• 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.

• Tests survive refactors because they assert on user-visible output, not internals.
• Accessible-role queries push teams towards accessible markup as a side effect.
• One idiom across every major front-end framework.

• No built-in mocking, snapshots, coverage or parallel-by-default execution.
• Assembling and documenting the stack is work every new project repeats.
• Fewer new projects adopt it; momentum sits with Vitest and Jest.

• Deliberately makes implementation-detail testing hard, which frustrates teams used to shallow rendering.
• Async utilities and act() warnings are a common source of confusion.
• Needs a runner and a DOM environment alongside it.

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

Any front-end team writing component tests, regardless of framework.