StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Testing Frameworks
  4. Javascript Testing Framework
  5. Jasmine vs Nightwatchjs

Jasmine vs Nightwatchjs

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Jasmine
Jasmine
Stacks4.8K
Followers1.5K
Votes187
Nightwatchjs
Nightwatchjs
Stacks214
Followers323
Votes11
GitHub Stars11.9K
Forks1.4K

Jasmine vs Nightwatchjs: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this Markdown code, we will discuss the key differences between Jasmine and Nightwatch.js. Both Jasmine and Nightwatch.js are popular testing frameworks used for different purposes.

  1. Test Structure and Organization: Jasmine is a behavior-driven development (BDD) framework that is mainly used for unit testing. It provides a clean and organized structure for writing tests in a more human-readable format. On the other hand, Nightwatch.js is used for end-to-end (E2E) testing and focuses on automating user interactions with the application. It follows a more declarative approach, allowing tests to be written in a step-by-step format.

  2. Testing Environment: Jasmine is mainly used for testing JavaScript code in a browser or Node.js environment. It provides built-in support for running tests in a browser or a headless browser like PhantomJS. Nightwatch.js, on the other hand, is specifically designed for testing web applications and runs tests in the browser using the WebDriver API.

  3. Assertions and Matchers: Jasmine provides a rich set of built-in matchers and assertions that make it easy to write expressive and readable tests. It includes a wide range of matchers for comparing values, checking conditions, and handling exceptions. Nightwatch.js also provides assertions and matchers, but its focus is more on providing a simplified syntax for performing common assertions, such as checking if an element is present, visible, or has a specific value.

  4. Parallel Execution: Jasmine runs tests sequentially, meaning it executes one test after another. It does not have built-in support for parallel test execution. On the other hand, Nightwatch.js supports parallel test execution out of the box. It allows running multiple tests concurrently, which can greatly reduce the overall test execution time.

  5. Integration with Test Runners: Jasmine can be easily integrated with popular test runners like Karma or Jest, which provide additional features like code coverage, test reporters, and test parallelization. Nightwatch.js, on the other hand, is a full-fledged test runner itself and does not require any additional tooling for running tests.

  6. Developer Friendliness: Jasmine is often considered more developer-friendly, as it provides a clean and readable syntax that is easy to understand and maintain. It also has a large and active community, which means there are plenty of resources and tutorials available. Nightwatch.js, while still developer-friendly, may require some additional setup and configuration for certain features. It has a smaller community compared to Jasmine, but it is growing steadily.

In summary, the key differences between Jasmine and Nightwatch.js are their purpose and focus, as well as their testing environment, test structure, assertions and matchers, parallel execution, integration with test runners, and developer-friendliness.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Jasmine, Nightwatchjs

Abigail
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.

231k views231k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Jasmine
Jasmine
Nightwatchjs
Nightwatchjs

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.

Nightwatch.js is an easy to use Node.js based End-to-End (E2E) testing solution for browser based apps and websites. It uses the powerful Selenium WebDriver API to perform commands and assertions on DOM elements.

-
e2e; test; javascript; nodejs
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
11.9K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
1.4K
Stacks
4.8K
Stacks
214
Followers
1.5K
Followers
323
Votes
187
Votes
11
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
  • 3
    Open source
  • 2
    Testing
  • 2
    Automates browsers
  • 1
    Parallel Test Running
  • 1
    Multiple Browser Support
Cons
  • 2
    No automatic wait
  • 1
    Configuration complexity
  • 1
    Limited browser support
  • 1
    Less flexibility
  • 1
    Limited native mobile app support
Integrations
No integrations available
Node.js
Node.js
Selenium
Selenium

What are some alternatives to Jasmine, Nightwatchjs?

BrowserStack

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

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

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

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

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.

Karma

Karma

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.

Jest

Jest

Jest provides you with multiple layers on top of Jasmine.

Cypress

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

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 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.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana