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testcritic

PHPUnit 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 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

BSD-3-Clause

MIT

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

PHP
JavaScriptTypeScript

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPI

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Category standard

Sebastian Bergmann · since 2004

Established

OSS community · since 2010

Strengths

  • Universal in PHP — every framework builds on it.
  • Mature mocking, data providers and coverage integration.
  • Well documented and extremely stable.
  • 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

  • Major versions drop older PHP releases aggressively, forcing upgrade work.
  • Verbose compared to newer wrappers such as Pest.
  • Coverage requires an extension, which slows runs significantly.
  • 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

Every PHP project, directly or through a wrapper.

Existing Angular codebases and browser-native test setups.

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