PHPUnit vs JUnit 5

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

Category standard

Sebastian Bergmann · since 2004

Category standard

JUnit Team · since 2017

• Universal in PHP — every framework builds on it.
• Mature mocking, data providers and coverage integration.
• Well documented and extremely stable.

• 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.

• Major versions drop older PHP releases aggressively, forcing upgrade work.
• Verbose compared to newer wrappers such as Pest.
• Coverage requires an extension, which slows runs significantly.

• 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.

Every PHP project, directly or through a wrapper.

Every Java and Kotlin project on the JVM.