Jasmine vs Vitest

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

Established

OSS community · since 2010

Category standard

VoidZero / OSS community · since 2021

• Self-contained: spies, clocks and matchers with no extra packages.
• Runs directly in a browser without bundling.
• Extremely stable API — old suites keep working.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Existing Angular codebases and browser-native test setups.

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