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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Testing Frameworks
  4. Javascript Testing Framework
  5. Jest vs react-testing-library

Jest vs react-testing-library

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Jest
Jest
Stacks15.2K
Followers4.1K
Votes175
react-testing-library
react-testing-library
Stacks297
Followers156
Votes4

Jest vs react-testing-library: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Jest and react-testing-library

Jest and react-testing-library are both popular tools used for testing React applications. While they serve similar purposes, there are key differences between the two.

  1. Rendering Approach: Jest uses a virtual JavaScript DOM (jsdom) environment to render components and simulate browser behavior. It provides a complete set of APIs for DOM manipulation, allowing developers to test all aspects of their components. On the other hand, react-testing-library follows a more lightweight approach, relying on the actual DOM and encouraging testing from a user's perspective rather than implementation details.

  2. Testing Philosophy: Jest is a powerful testing framework that includes features such as mocking, spying, and code coverage analysis. It emphasizes on testing the internal behavior of components, including their state and logic. React-testing-library, however, promotes testing the outward behavior of components by focusing on the rendered output and how users interact with it. It encourages testing components as a black box, without direct access to their internal implementation details.

  3. API Complexity: Jest provides a wide range of APIs and utilities for testing React components, making it highly flexible but also more complex. It offers features like test runners, assertions, matchers, and mocks, allowing developers to write sophisticated test suites. On the other hand, react-testing-library offers a simpler and more opinionated API. It focuses on providing a small set of intuitive methods that allow developers to write tests that closely resemble how users interact with components.

  4. Test Performance: Jest is known for its fast performance and the ability to parallelize test execution. It optimizes test runs by running tests in parallel across multiple threads. React-testing-library, while not as performant as Jest, still provides a decent level of performance for most applications. It emphasizes more on the user experience perspective rather than optimizing for execution speed.

  5. Learning Curve: Due to its comprehensive feature set, Jest has a steeper learning curve compared to react-testing-library. Understanding the various APIs and configurations of Jest may take more time and effort. React-testing-library, being more focused and opinionated, has a smaller and simpler API surface, making it quicker to learn and get started with.

  6. Community Support and Ecosystem: Both Jest and react-testing-library have active communities and widespread adoption. Jest, being a more mature testing framework, has a larger community and a more extensive ecosystem. It has a wide range of plugins, extensions, and integrations available, making it more versatile for various testing scenarios. React-testing-library has gained popularity for its user-centric approach and has a growing ecosystem, but it may have fewer resources and integrations compared to Jest.

In Summary, Jest and react-testing-library have differences in their rendering approach, testing philosophy, API complexity, test performance, learning curve, and community support. While Jest offers more flexibility and advanced features, react-testing-library focuses on simplicity and testing from a user's perspective.

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Advice on Jest, react-testing-library

Dane
Dane

Feb 7, 2020

Needs adviceonCypressCypressJestJest

As we all know testing is an important part of any application. To assist with our testing we are going to use both Cypress and Jest. We feel these tools complement each other and will help us get good coverage of our code. We will use Cypress for our end to end testing as we've found it quite user friendly. Jest will be used for our unit tests because we've seen how many larger companies use it with great success.

836k views836k
Comments
Anonymous
Anonymous

Feb 6, 2020

Needs advice

Postman will be used to do integration testing with the backend API we create. It offers a clean interface to create many requests, and you can even organize these requests into collections. It helps to test the backend API first to make sure it's working before using it in the front-end. Jest can also be used for testing and is already embedded into React. Not only does it offer unit testing support in javascript, it can also do snapshot testing for the front-end to make sure components are rendering correctly. Enzyme is complementary to Jest and offers more functions such as shallow rendering. UnitTest will be used for Python testing as it is simple, has a lot of functionality and already built in with python. Sentry will be used for keeping track of errors as it is also easily integratable with Heroku because they offer it as an add-on. LogDNA will be used for tracking logs which are not errors and is also a Heroku add-on. Its good to have a separate service to record logs, monitor, track and even fix errors in real-time so our application can run more smoothly.

290k views290k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Jest
Jest
react-testing-library
react-testing-library

Jest provides you with multiple layers on top of Jasmine.

It is a simple and complete React DOM testing utility that encourage good testing practices. It provides light utility functions on top of react-dom and react-dom/test-utils, in a way that encourages better testing practices.

Familiar Approach: Built on top of the Jasmine test framework, using familiar expect(value).toBe(other) assertions;Mock by Default: Automatically mocks CommonJS modules returned by require(), making most existing code testable;Short Feedback Loop: DOM APIs are mocked and tests run in parallel via a small node.js command line utility
light-weight solution for testing; React DOM testing utilities; works with any environment that provides DOM APIs;
Statistics
Stacks
15.2K
Stacks
297
Followers
4.1K
Followers
156
Votes
175
Votes
4
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 36
    Open source
  • 32
    Mock by default makes testing much simpler
  • 23
    Testing React Native Apps
  • 20
    Parallel test running
  • 16
    Fast
Cons
  • 4
    Ambiguous configuration
  • 4
    Documentation
  • 3
    Difficult
  • 2
    Bugged
  • 2
    Difficult to run single test/describe/file
Pros
  • 3
    We can test behavior
  • 1
    Good documentation
Integrations
No integrations available
Vue.js
Vue.js
React
React
AngularJS
AngularJS

What are some alternatives to Jest, react-testing-library?

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.

Jasmine

Jasmine

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.

Robot Framework

Robot Framework

It is a generic test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development. It has easy-to-use tabular test data syntax and it utilizes the keyword-driven testing approach. Its testing capabilities can be extended by test libraries implemented either with Python or Java, and users can create new higher-level keywords from existing ones using the same syntax that is used for creating test cases.

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.

Karate DSL

Karate DSL

Combines API test-automation, mocks and performance-testing into a single, unified framework. The BDD syntax popularized by Cucumber is language-neutral, and easy for even non-programmers. Besides powerful JSON & XML assertions, you can run tests in parallel for speed - which is critical for HTTP API testing.

CodeceptJS

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.

Cucumber

Cucumber

Cucumber is a tool that supports Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) - a software development process that aims to enhance software quality and reduce maintenance costs.

Protractor

Protractor

Protractor is an end-to-end test framework for Angular and AngularJS applications. Protractor runs tests against your application running in a real browser, interacting with it as a user would.

AVA

AVA

Even though JavaScript is single-threaded, IO in Node.js can happen in parallel due to its async nature. AVA takes advantage of this and runs your tests concurrently, which is especially beneficial for IO heavy tests. In addition, test files are run in parallel as separate processes, giving you even better performance and an isolated environment for each test file.

TestCafe

TestCafe

It is a pure node.js end-to-end solution for testing web apps. It takes care of all the stages: starting browsers, running tests, gathering test results and generating reports.

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