Pest vs Jest

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.

PestJest

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

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Pest / Laravel community · since 2020

Category standard

OpenJS Foundation · since 2014

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.

Everything in one dependency, with defaults that work for most projects on day one.
The largest ecosystem of matchers, reporters and framework presets in JavaScript.
Snapshot testing is genuinely useful for serialisable output when used with restraint.

Limitations

Native ESM support remains awkward, and the Babel transform layer is a recurring configuration tax.
Noticeably slower than Vitest on large suites.
jsdom is not a browser; subtle DOM and CSS behaviour differs from reality.

Best for

Laravel teams and modern PHP projects that find PHPUnit verbose.

Existing JavaScript codebases, React Native, and teams that value ecosystem depth over raw speed.

All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.

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