PHPUnit vs RSpec

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

RSpec Team · since 2005

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

• The output reads as documentation of intended behaviour.
• Shared examples and contexts keep large Rails suites organised.
• Deep integration with the Rails ecosystem — Capybara, FactoryBot, VCR.

• 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.

• Deeply nested contexts with let and before hooks become very hard to follow.
• The DSL is a language of its own to learn.
• Rails suites tend towards slowness; expect to invest in parallelisation.

Every PHP project, directly or through a wrapper.

Ruby and Rails applications.