PHPUnit vs NUnit

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

Widely used

.NET Foundation · since 2002

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

• The most expressive built-in assertion library in .NET.
• Familiar attribute model for teams migrating from older frameworks.
• Very stable, very long-lived.

• 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.

• Shared test-class instances mean state can leak between tests unless you are careful.
• New Microsoft templates default to xUnit, so it is drifting from the mainstream.
• Attribute-heavy style feels dated.

Every PHP project, directly or through a wrapper.

Existing .NET codebases already standardised on NUnit.