Comparing the best Node js unit testing frameworks LogRocket Blog

AVA provides cleaner stack traces for potentially detected errors to help make the application more effective. As it is developed by Meta and is based on Jasmine, it is evident that Jest is mainly used for projects revolving around React. However, you can also use it to test your Angular, VueJS, Babel, Typescript, and NodeJs projects. Before jumping onto anything, you must know what all areas or features of the AUT are most important. Create a list of identified and important features to be tested, different scenarios related to each feature, and the required testing level. The primary factor to choose Karma lies in its support to integrate with CI/CD engines and the following features.

Community- It has been on the market since 2009 and gathered a vast amount of articles, suggestions and tools that are based on it. Development- jest only updates the files updated, so tests are running very fast in watch mode. Reliability- Since it has a huge community, and used in many very complex projects, is is considered very reliable.

Unexpected is an assertion library with a slightly different syntax from Chai. It is also extensible so assertions can be more advanced with libraries that are based on it like unexpected-react that you can read about more in depth here. To start testing, https://bitcoin-mining.biz/ you need to choose a testing structure that suits you, choose the style of assertion functions you like, and decide how do you want to run the tests. Looking forward, I forecast that AI would become more impactful in the field of automated tests.

The most famous of them is React Testing Library which is very widely adopted. Sometimes the quick and effective unit and integration tests are not enough. Should cover all the small pure units of an application- utils, services and helpers.

Popular Unit Testing Frameworks for JavaScript

Sinon.JS — Standalone test spies, stubs and mocks for JavaScript. Just thinking about it makes many people want to slow down and reduce the pace of code updates, which is exactly the opposite of what most software teams need to achieve. How often have you seen a desire to introduce more benefits and improvements into the software projects as quickly as possible?

A popular testing library for Node.js, AVA is often preferred for the strong features allowing for process isolation that allows each test file to run in a separate Node.js process. This process isolation can help reduce the potential for interference across test cases, making test outputs more reliable and faster to execute as they run concurrently. Cypress is also a JavaScript testing framework that is favored for React projects, but is also more broadly applicable across other JavaScript frameworks like Angular and Node.

It has wide support for executing tests on different devices and applications. The dream of every JavaScript developer is to create a bug-free web app. You can start your journey on the path of a bug-free code by unit testing your components.

It is the first choice by developers of the JQuery, JQuery Mobile and JQuery UI libraries. Cypress is an exciting testing framework that practically runs on the browser. It provides an interactive UI on the browser in the form of a web page. It can be easily installed on Mac, Windows as well as Linux.

With unit testing, you can run independent tests on each function. You have to provide an input that’s supposed to produce a known output. And if the output that comes after testing matches the known output, then your testing is successful. Ponicode for JavaScript and Typescript today integrates with Jest. We chose Jest because of its widespread community and because it doesn’t require installing any external libraries. The only external library we decided to use is rewire, which permits us to test even unexported functions – something that Jest does not allow to do out-of-the-box.

jasmine/jasmine

Lets you record your tests using a chrome extension, has in-depth visual regression reporting. Has some nice integrations like with storybook different CI tools and BrowserStack and Sauce Labs. Yandex now migrated to hermione that runs tests using WebdriverIO and Mocha.js and uses LooksSame for visual regressions. It is more simple and limited than the paid tools mentioned above, but for simple websites, it can be enough.

There have been several notable advancements in the field of web development. Developer communities are now adopting more dynamic frameworks than conventional programming languages like Java, PHP, .NET. Unit testing is the process of testing the implemented code at a module level.

Smart and fast integrated continuous test runner for JavaScript, TypeScript, CoffeeScript. It enables continuous…

If anything changes, you are prompted to accept the visual changes locally and as part of the project’s pipelines. Opens your application in a separate window and uses a browser extension to record your manual interactions with the application as test scenarios. It can be integrated conveniently with many of the tools discussed above. There are a lot of tools of this type in the market, but it feels like this field still has a long way to do. UI for humans to approve, reject and improve the comparison mechanism to only show what’s relevant for the user. Probably because of the introduction of “Puppeteer” as well which provides you with the same features out of the box.

• Unlike other testing frameworks such as Jest and Jasmine, it does not create test globals.
• Built with accessibility in mind, its approach also makes refactoring a breeze.
• Note that it won’t be an easy task to hit 100% code coverage.
• Apart from integration testing and user interface testing, the most important of all is unit testing.

Notice that this tool doesn’t come with a build-in testing system. Tools like mocha and chai can be used to create the necessary testing environment and structure around this library. Old school tests were focused on unit testing and resulted in applications where many small parts were working but the processes as a whole kept on failing.

Developed by Google, Puppeteer provides a cool way to unit test your JavaScript components. For Node JS apps, Puppeteer provides a headless application programming interface that you can use in Chrome. Not only that, unit testing helps you find bugs early in the development cycle. If you’re a developer, finding and fixing the bugs by yourself will improve the code quality and make the testing phase easier.

How to Choose the Best Unit Testing Framework for JavaScript

One for running unit and integration tests and another one for E2E Tests. This is because functional tests usually take much longer to run, especially when running the test suite on several different browsers. At the heart of Storybook is the ability to create independent components to facilitate unit testing, which makes it easy to then showcase the components in an isolated development environment. Cypress is another popular JavaScript testing framework that requires no setup and runs directly in the browser with an interactive interface. Additionally, Cypress can be used on Mac, Linux, and Windows.

It’s tough to directly compare Storybook to our other testing frameworks, so if this sounds useful for your project, we’d encourage you to do a bit more research of your own. It does not support assertions, spies and mocks out of the box but it’s possible to add these functionalities with add-ons/plugins. The most popular choice of assertion library to pair with Mocha is Chai, but other options are Assert, Should.js and Better-assert. The second most-used library, Mocha is only a test framework and provides developers with just the base test structure.

Hi, I’m Sushrut, a Developer and a Freelance Technical Writer holding 3+ years of experience in content writing. Geolocation testing to test websites from different geographies to give a perfect experience across all locations. Storybook can also perform Interaction, Visual Validation, Accessibility, etc. Visual testing is one of the most popular aspects of Storybook. These metrics will help you understand the amount of preparation and the type of automation test strategy needed. Once you are clear with the areas and features to test and the test automation strategy, you can move to the next step.

avajs/ava

There is a long list of other benefits to automated testing covered in our other posts, though these are some of the highlights in the context of unit testing. Vitest is a test runner that provides a compatible API which means you can use it as an alternative to Jest in most projects. The Vite team has provided a comparison page that you may find helpful if you are looking for an alternative to the popular test runners out there, like Jest or Cypress. Unlike Jest, the React Testing library is not a test runner. The Testing Library is a collection of tools and functions that let you access DOM and perform actions, such as rendering elements into Virtual DOM, browsing, and interacting with it.

If you want to hit the ground running, you can’t go wrong with Jest. It’s an extremely fast framework, easy to set up, and has a lot of built-in features. Jest is a JavaScript testing framework developed and regularly maintained by Facebook.

It relies on a common automation standard that is properly tested and ensures compatibility for the future. This standard allows WebdriverIO to work How Much Does A Taxi App Development Cost in 2022 with any browser, regardless of how it is configured or used. Used and recommended by Facebook, Jest is officially supported by the React dev team.