Jasmine vs Karma

Overview

Jasmine

Stacks4.8K

Followers1.5K

Votes187

Karma

Stacks4.8K

Followers603

Votes181

GitHub Stars12.0K

Forks1.7K

Jasmine vs Karma: What are the differences?

Jasmine and Karma are both popular testing frameworks for JavaScript applications. Jasmine emphasizes simplicity and readability with its behavior-driven development approach, while Karma serves as a test runner, offering a testing environment and supporting features like coverage and CI integration. Here are the key differences between Jasmine and Karma:

Test Framework vs Test Runner: Jasmine is primarily a behavior-driven development (BDD) test framework. It provides a set of functions and APIs for writing and organizing tests, along with built-in assertion libraries. Jasmine allows you to describe test suites, define test cases, and run assertions to verify the expected behavior of your code. On the other hand, Karma is a test runner that works with various testing frameworks, including Jasmine. Karma provides a test environment, launches browsers or headless browsers to execute tests, and collects test results.
Test Execution Environment: Jasmine runs tests directly in the browser or through Node.js, allowing you to test both client-side and server-side JavaScript code. It provides a simple and intuitive syntax for writing tests and supports asynchronous testing with the help of built-in functions like done or async/await. Karma, on the other hand, provides a test execution environment that can run tests in multiple browsers simultaneously. It spawns browser instances and captures the results, providing a consistent testing environment across different browsers and platforms.
Configuration and Flexibility: Jasmine is easy to set up and requires minimal configuration. It provides a self-contained framework with built-in matchers and a test runner. Jasmine's focus is on simplicity and readability. Karma, on the other hand, requires additional configuration to set up the test environment and specify the browsers to be used for testing. It offers more flexibility in terms of customizing the test runner, integrating with build tools like Webpack or Grunt, and configuring code coverage reports or CI systems.
Community and Ecosystem: Both Jasmine and Karma have active communities and extensive ecosystems. Jasmine has a rich set of built-in features, including spies, mocks, and test doubles. It is widely used for testing JavaScript applications across different frameworks and libraries. Karma, being a test runner, can work with various testing frameworks, including Jasmine, Mocha, and QUnit. It provides plugins and integrations with popular build tools, testing frameworks, and continuous integration systems.

In summary, Jasmine is a behavior-driven development test framework that focuses on simplicity and readability. It provides a set of functions and APIs for writing tests, along with built-in assertion libraries. Karma, on the other hand, is a test runner that can work with multiple testing frameworks, including Jasmine. It provides a test execution environment, supports running tests in multiple browsers, and offers more configuration options and flexibility.

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Advice on Jasmine, Karma

Abigail

Dec 10, 2019

Decided

We use Mocha for our FDA verification testing. It's integrated into Meteor, our upstream web application framework. We like how battle tested it is, its' syntax, its' options of reporters, and countless other features. Most everybody can agree on mocha, and that gets us half-way through our FDA verification and validation (V&V) testing strategy.

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Detailed Comparison

Jasmine	Karma
Jasmine is a Behavior Driven Development testing framework for JavaScript. It does not rely on browsers, DOM, or any JavaScript framework. Thus it's suited for websites, Node.js projects, or anywhere that JavaScript can run.	Karma is not a testing framework, nor an assertion library. Karma just launches a HTTP server, and generates the test runner HTML file you probably already know from your favourite testing framework. So for testing purposes you can use pretty much anything you like.
-	Test on Real Devices;Remote Control;Testing Framework Agnostic;Open Source;Easy Debugging;Continuous Integration
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 12.0K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.7K
Stacks 4.8K	Stacks 4.8K
Followers 1.5K	Followers 603
Votes 187	Votes 181
Pros & Cons
Pros 64 Can also be used for tdd 49 Open source 19 Originally from RSpec 15 Great community 14 No dependencies, not even DOM Cons 2 Unfriendly error logs	Pros 61 Test Runner 35 Open source 27 Continuous Integration 22 Great for running tests 18 Test on Real Devices Cons 1 Requires the use of hacks to find tests dynamically 1 Slow, because tests are run in a real browser
Integrations
No integrations available	Mocha

What are some alternatives to Jasmine, Karma?

BrowserStack

BrowserStack is the leading test platform built for developers & QAs to expand test coverage, scale & optimize testing with cross-browser, real device cloud, accessibility, visual testing, test management, and test observability.

Selenium

Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) also be automated as well.

Sauce Labs

Cloud-based automated testing platform enables developers and QEs to perform functional, JavaScript unit, and manual tests with Selenium or Appium on web and mobile apps. Videos and screenshots for easy debugging. Secure and CI-ready.

Mocha

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.

LambdaTest

LambdaTest platform provides secure, scalable and insightful test orchestration for website, and mobile app testing. Customers at different points in their DevOps lifecycle can leverage Automation and/or Manual testing on LambdaTest.

Jest

Jest provides you with multiple layers on top of Jasmine.

Cypress

Cypress is a front end automated testing application created for the modern web. Cypress is built on a new architecture and runs in the same run-loop as the application being tested. As a result Cypress provides better, faster, and more reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser. Cypress works on any front-end framework or website.

Playwright

It is a Node library to automate the Chromium, WebKit and Firefox browsers with a single API. It enables cross-browser web automation that is ever-green, capable, reliable and fast.

Rainforest QA

Rainforest gives you the reliability of a QA team and the speed of automation, without the hassle of managing a team or the pain of writing automated tests.

CodeceptJS

It is a modern end to end testing framework with a special BDD-style syntax. The test is written as a linear scenario of user's action on a site. Each test is described inside a Scenario function with I object passed into it.

Related Comparisons

Test Framework vs Test Runner: Jasmine is primarily a behavior-driven development (BDD) test framework. It provides a set of functions and APIs for writing and organizing tests, along with built-in assertion libraries. Jasmine allows you to describe test suites, define test cases, and run assertions to verify the expected behavior of your code. On the other hand, Karma is a test runner that works with various testing frameworks, including Jasmine. Karma provides a test environment, launches browsers or headless browsers to execute tests, and collects test results.
Test Execution Environment: Jasmine runs tests directly in the browser or through Node.js, allowing you to test both client-side and server-side JavaScript code. It provides a simple and intuitive syntax for writing tests and supports asynchronous testing with the help of built-in functions like done or async/await. Karma, on the other hand, provides a test execution environment that can run tests in multiple browsers simultaneously. It spawns browser instances and captures the results, providing a consistent testing environment across different browsers and platforms.
Configuration and Flexibility: Jasmine is easy to set up and requires minimal configuration. It provides a self-contained framework with built-in matchers and a test runner. Jasmine's focus is on simplicity and readability. Karma, on the other hand, requires additional configuration to set up the test environment and specify the browsers to be used for testing. It offers more flexibility in terms of customizing the test runner, integrating with build tools like Webpack or Grunt, and configuring code coverage reports or CI systems.
Community and Ecosystem: Both Jasmine and Karma have active communities and extensive ecosystems. Jasmine has a rich set of built-in features, including spies, mocks, and test doubles. It is widely used for testing JavaScript applications across different frameworks and libraries. Karma, being a test runner, can work with various testing frameworks, including Jasmine, Mocha, and QUnit. It provides plugins and integrations with popular build tools, testing frameworks, and continuous integration systems.

Jasmine vs Karma