RSpec 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

Widely used

RSpec Team · since 2005

Widely used

TestNG Team · since 2004

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Ruby and Rails applications.

Java Selenium automation frameworks and large integration suites.