AVA vs Jasmine
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.
Entry price
Free and open source
Open sourceFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
MIT
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
OSS community · since 2015
Established
OSS community · since 2010
Strengths
- 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.
- Self-contained: spies, clocks and matchers with no extra packages.
- Runs directly in a browser without bundling.
- Extremely stable API — old suites keep working.
Limitations
- No DOM environment; not for front-end work.
- No built-in mocking or snapshots comparable to Jest.
- Smaller community than the mainstream runners.
- Feels dated; snapshot testing and modern mocking are absent or bolted on.
- Momentum has moved to Jest and Vitest, including within the Angular ecosystem.
- Weaker TypeScript ergonomics than newer runners.
Best for
Node libraries where test isolation and speed matter more than ecosystem breadth.
Existing Angular codebases and browser-native test setups.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.