Mocha vs TestNG

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

Widely used

TestNG Team · since 2004

• 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.

• Mature parallel-execution and grouping model, ideal for large Selenium suites.
• Data providers make data-driven testing straightforward.
• Test dependencies and ordering, which JUnit deliberately avoids.

• 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.

• XML suite configuration is dated and error-prone.
• Test dependencies encourage ordering coupling that makes suites fragile.
• Community momentum favours JUnit 5 for new projects.

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

Java Selenium automation frameworks and large integration suites.