PHPUnit vs pytest

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

pytest-dev · since 2004

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

• Fixtures are the best dependency-injection model in any test framework, and they compose cleanly.
• Assertion introspection produces genuinely useful failure output from a plain assert.
• Vast plugin ecosystem — pytest-xdist, pytest-cov, pytest-asyncio, pytest-django.

• 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.

• Fixture scope and ordering become genuinely hard to reason about in large suites.
• The magic that makes simple cases elegant makes complex cases opaque.
• Python only.

Every PHP project, directly or through a wrapper.

Essentially every Python project.