PHPUnit vs Pest

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

Pest / Laravel community · since 2020

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

Every PHP project, directly or through a wrapper.

Laravel teams and modern PHP projects that find PHPUnit verbose.