Pest vs Mocha

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.

PestMocha

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

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Pest / Laravel community · since 2020

Widely used

OpenJS Foundation · since 2011

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.

Small, stable and predictable — it does one job and has done it the same way for years.
Pick your own assertions, mocks and coverage rather than accepting a bundle.
Excellent async and reporter support.

Limitations

Best for

Laravel teams and modern PHP projects that find PHPUnit verbose.

Node.js services where you want explicit control over every part of the test stack.

All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.

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