Vitest vs Testing Library

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

Category standard

OSS community · since 2018

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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