Pest vs AVA

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.

PestAVA

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

JavaScriptTypeScript

Platforms

WebAPI

API

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market

Solo / side projectStartup

Adoption

Widely used

Pest / Laravel community · since 2020

Established

OSS community · since 2015

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.

Process isolation catches hidden coupling between tests that other runners hide.
Concurrent by default, so suites stay fast without configuration.
Clean, small API with no magic globals.

Limitations

Best for

Laravel teams and modern PHP projects that find PHPUnit verbose.

Node libraries where test isolation and speed matter more than ecosystem breadth.

All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.

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