NUnit vs pytest

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.

NUnitpytest

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

Python

Platforms

WebAPIDesktop

WebAPI

Fits teams

Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

.NET Foundation · since 2002

Category standard

pytest-dev · since 2004

Strengths

Fixtures are the best dependency-injection model in any test framework, and they compose cleanly.
Assertion introspection produces genuinely useful failure output from a plain assert.
Vast plugin ecosystem — pytest-xdist, pytest-cov, pytest-asyncio, pytest-django.

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.

Fixture scope and ordering become genuinely hard to reason about in large suites.
The magic that makes simple cases elegant makes complex cases opaque.
Python only.

Best for

Existing .NET codebases already standardised on NUnit.

Essentially every Python project.

All of these integrate with: Jenkins.

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