NUnit 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.

NUnitPest

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

PHP

Platforms

WebAPIDesktop

WebAPI

Fits teams

Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market

Adoption

Widely used

.NET Foundation · since 2002

Widely used

Pest / Laravel community · since 2020

Strengths

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

Shared test-class instances mean state can leak between tests unless you are careful.
New Microsoft templates default to xUnit, so it is drifting from the mainstream.
Attribute-heavy style feels dated.

Best for

Existing .NET codebases already standardised on NUnit.

Laravel teams and modern PHP projects that find PHPUnit verbose.

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