Pest vs TestNG

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

TestNG Team · since 2004

• 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.

• Mature parallel-execution and grouping model, ideal for large Selenium suites.
• Data providers make data-driven testing straightforward.
• Test dependencies and ordering, which JUnit deliberately avoids.

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

• XML suite configuration is dated and error-prone.
• Test dependencies encourage ordering coupling that makes suites fragile.
• Community momentum favours JUnit 5 for new projects.

Laravel teams and modern PHP projects that find PHPUnit verbose.

Java Selenium automation frameworks and large integration suites.