xUnit.net vs Pest

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.

xUnit.netPest

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

Apache-2.0

MIT

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

PHP

Platforms

WebAPIDesktop

WebAPI

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market

Adoption

Category standard

.NET Foundation · since 2007

Widely used

Pest / Laravel community · since 2020

Strengths

Per-test instance isolation eliminates a whole class of shared-state bugs by design.
Idiomatic modern C# — no attribute soup.
The default in current .NET project templates.

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.

Limitations

Best for

New .NET projects.

Laravel teams and modern PHP projects that find PHPUnit verbose.

All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.

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