Pest vs RSpec

Free and open source

Free and open source

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Pest / Laravel community · since 2020

Widely used

RSpec Team · since 2005

• 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.

• The output reads as documentation of intended behaviour.
• Shared examples and contexts keep large Rails suites organised.
• Deep integration with the Rails ecosystem — Capybara, FactoryBot, VCR.

• Another abstraction layer to debug when something goes wrong underneath.
• Strongest in the Laravel world; thinner elsewhere.
• Smaller ecosystem of examples than PHPUnit.

• Deeply nested contexts with let and before hooks become very hard to follow.
• The DSL is a language of its own to learn.
• Rails suites tend towards slowness; expect to invest in parallelisation.

Laravel teams and modern PHP projects that find PHPUnit verbose.

Ruby and Rails applications.