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testcritic

Jasmine vs Mocha

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 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 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

JavaScriptTypeScript
JavaScriptTypeScript

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPI

Fits teams

Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Established

OSS community · since 2010

Widely used

OpenJS Foundation · since 2011

Strengths

  • Self-contained: spies, clocks and matchers with no extra packages.
  • Runs directly in a browser without bundling.
  • Extremely stable API — old suites keep working.
  • Small, stable and predictable — it does one job and has done it the same way for years.
  • Pick your own assertions, mocks and coverage rather than accepting a bundle.
  • Excellent async and reporter support.

Limitations

  • 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.
  • No built-in mocking, snapshots, coverage or parallel-by-default execution.
  • Assembling and documenting the stack is work every new project repeats.
  • Fewer new projects adopt it; momentum sits with Vitest and Jest.

Best for

Existing Angular codebases and browser-native test setups.

Node.js services where you want explicit control over every part of the test stack.

All of these integrate with: Jenkins.

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