Pest vs pytest

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.

Pestpytest

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

Python

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

pytest-dev · since 2004

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.

Fixtures are the best dependency-injection model in any test framework, and they compose cleanly.
Assertion introspection produces genuinely useful failure output from a plain assert.
Vast plugin ecosystem — pytest-xdist, pytest-cov, pytest-asyncio, pytest-django.

Limitations

Fixture scope and ordering become genuinely hard to reason about in large suites.
The magic that makes simple cases elegant makes complex cases opaque.
Python only.

Best for

Laravel teams and modern PHP projects that find PHPUnit verbose.

Essentially every Python project.

All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.

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