pytest vs TestNG

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

pytest-dev · since 2004

Widely used

TestNG Team · since 2004

• 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.

• Mature parallel-execution and grouping model, ideal for large Selenium suites.
• Data providers make data-driven testing straightforward.
• Test dependencies and ordering, which JUnit deliberately avoids.

• 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.

• XML suite configuration is dated and error-prone.
• Test dependencies encourage ordering coupling that makes suites fragile.
• Community momentum favours JUnit 5 for new projects.

Essentially every Python project.

Java Selenium automation frameworks and large integration suites.