Testing Library vs AVA

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

Testing LibraryAVA

Entry price

Free and open source

Open source

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

MIT

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScript

Platforms

Web

API

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Solo / side projectStartup

Adoption

Category standard

OSS community · since 2018

Established

OSS community · since 2015

Strengths

Tests survive refactors because they assert on user-visible output, not internals.
Accessible-role queries push teams towards accessible markup as a side effect.
One idiom across every major front-end framework.

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.

Limitations

Deliberately makes implementation-detail testing hard, which frustrates teams used to shallow rendering.
Async utilities and act() warnings are a common source of confusion.
Needs a runner and a DOM environment alongside it.

Best for

Any front-end team writing component tests, regardless of framework.

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

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.