Pest vs JUnit 5

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.

PestJUnit 5

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

EPL-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

PHP

JavaKotlin

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

JUnit Team · since 2017

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.

Universal support across IDEs, build tools and CI in the Java ecosystem.
The extension model replaced JUnit 4's runners and rules with something composable.
Pairs cleanly with Mockito, AssertJ, Spring Test and Testcontainers.

Limitations

Java verbosity persists — expect more lines per test than in Python or JavaScript.
Parallel execution is opt-in and still occasionally surprising.
Mixed JUnit 4 and 5 codebases need the vintage engine and stay confusing for years.

Best for

Laravel teams and modern PHP projects that find PHPUnit verbose.

Every Java and Kotlin project on the JVM.

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