RSpec vs AVA

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

Widely used

RSpec Team · since 2005

Established

OSS community · since 2015

• 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.

• Process isolation catches hidden coupling between tests that other runners hide.
• Concurrent by default, so suites stay fast without configuration.
• Clean, small API with no magic globals.

• 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.

• No DOM environment; not for front-end work.
• No built-in mocking or snapshots comparable to Jest.
• Smaller community than the mainstream runners.

Ruby and Rails applications.

Node libraries where test isolation and speed matter more than ecosystem breadth.