RSpec vs unittest

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

Python Software Foundation · since 2001

• 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.

• In the standard library — nothing to install or vet.
• unittest.mock is excellent and used almost universally in Python.
• Familiar to anyone coming from JUnit or NUnit.

• 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.

• Verbose compared to pytest for the same coverage.
• No parametrisation or fixture composition worth the name.
• Most teams run unittest tests through pytest anyway.

Ruby and Rails applications.

Standard-library-only environments and codebases that already use it.