NUnit vs xUnit.net

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.

NUnitxUnit.net

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

Apache-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

Platforms

WebAPIDesktop

Fits teams

Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

.NET Foundation · since 2002

Category standard

.NET Foundation · since 2007

Strengths

Per-test instance isolation eliminates a whole class of shared-state bugs by design.
Idiomatic modern C# — no attribute soup.
The default in current .NET project templates.

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.

New .NET projects.

All of these integrate with: dotnet test, Visual Studio, Azure DevOps, Moq.

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