Capybara vs Mocha: What are the differences?
Developers describe Capybara as "Acceptance test framework for web applications". Capybara helps you test web applications by simulating how a real user would interact with your app. It is agnostic about the driver running your tests and comes with Rack::Test and Selenium support built in. WebKit is supported through an external gem. On the other hand, Mocha is detailed as "Simple, flexible, fun javascript test framework for node.js & the browser". Mocha is a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on node.js and the browser, making asynchronous testing simple and fun. Mocha tests run serially, allowing for flexible and accurate reporting, while mapping uncaught exceptions to the correct test cases.
Capybara can be classified as a tool in the "Testing Frameworks" category, while Mocha is grouped under "Javascript Testing Framework".
Some of the features offered by Capybara are:
- No setup necessary for Rails and Rack application. Works out of the box.
- Intuitive API which mimics the language an actual user would use.
- Switch the backend your tests run against from fast headless mode to an actual browser with no changes to your tests.
On the other hand, Mocha provides the following key features:
- browser support
- simple async support, including promises
- test coverage reporting
"Best acceptance test framework for Ruby on Rails apps" is the primary reason why developers consider Capybara over the competitors, whereas "Open source" was stated as the key factor in picking Mocha.
Capybara and Mocha are both open source tools. It seems that Mocha with 18.1K GitHub stars and 2.44K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Capybara with 8.84K GitHub stars and 1.29K GitHub forks.
Coursera, Asana, and Typeform are some of the popular companies that use Mocha, whereas Capybara is used by GrowthHackers, sQuidd.io, and Indiegogo. Mocha has a broader approval, being mentioned in 399 company stacks & 272 developers stacks; compared to Capybara, which is listed in 38 company stacks and 21 developer stacks.