Testing Library vs RSpec

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

OSS community · since 2018

Widely used

RSpec Team · since 2005

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

Ruby and Rails applications.