Jest vs AVA

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.

JestAVA

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

MIT

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScript

Platforms

WebAPI

API

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Solo / side projectStartup

Adoption

Category standard

OpenJS Foundation · since 2014

Established

OSS community · since 2015

Strengths

Everything in one dependency, with defaults that work for most projects on day one.
The largest ecosystem of matchers, reporters and framework presets in JavaScript.
Snapshot testing is genuinely useful for serialisable output when used with restraint.

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.

Limitations

Native ESM support remains awkward, and the Babel transform layer is a recurring configuration tax.
Noticeably slower than Vitest on large suites.
jsdom is not a browser; subtle DOM and CSS behaviour differs from reality.

Best for

Existing JavaScript codebases, React Native, and teams that value ecosystem depth over raw speed.

Node libraries where test isolation and speed matter more than ecosystem breadth.

All of these integrate with: GitHub Actions.

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