Vitest vs Pest

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

VoidZero / OSS community · since 2021

Widely used

Pest / Laravel community · since 2020

• Fastest watch-mode feedback of the JavaScript runners, by a wide margin on large repos.
• Zero-config ESM and TypeScript — the single biggest source of Jest configuration pain simply disappears.
• Jest-compatible API means migration is usually a day, not a quarter.

• Much less boilerplate than raw PHPUnit for the same coverage.
• Architecture testing — enforcing layering rules as tests — is a genuinely useful addition.
• Fully compatible with existing PHPUnit tests, so adoption is incremental.

• Assumes Vite. On a Webpack or Metro project the advantage largely evaporates.
• Younger ecosystem; a handful of niche Jest plugins have no equivalent.
• Browser mode is still maturing relative to a dedicated component test runner.

• Another abstraction layer to debug when something goes wrong underneath.
• Strongest in the Laravel world; thinner elsewhere.
• Smaller ecosystem of examples than PHPUnit.

Any Vite-based project, and most new JavaScript projects generally.

Laravel teams and modern PHP projects that find PHPUnit verbose.