Overview

Jest

Stacks15.2K

Followers4.1K

Votes175

SuperTest

Stacks1.9K

Followers102

Votes0

Jest vs SuperTest: What are the differences?

Jest and SuperTest are both popular testing frameworks in JavaScript, but they serve different purposes and have distinct features. Let's explore the key differences between them.

Testing Environment: Jest provides a full-featured testing environment out of the box, allowing you to write and run tests without the need for any additional setup or libraries. On the other hand, SuperTest is a library specifically designed for testing HTTP servers or APIs.
Assertion Library: Jest comes with its own built-in assertion library and provides a wide range of built-in matchers, making it easy to write assertions in your test cases. SuperTest, being more focused on API testing, does not provide an assertion library. Instead, it integrates well with popular assertion libraries like Chai, allowing you to use your preferred assertion style.
Mocking Capabilities: Jest has powerful mocking capabilities built into its framework, allowing you to easily mock dependencies and external modules. It provides a simple API for creating and managing mocks, spying on function calls, and controlling their behavior during the test. Unlike Jest, SuperTest does not have built-in mocking capabilities.
Code Coverage: Jest provides built-in code coverage analysis, which allows you to track the percentage of your code that is covered by tests. It generates code coverage reports that help you identify areas of your codebase that need better test coverage. SuperTest, being focused on API testing, does not offer built-in code coverage functionality.
Async Testing: Jest has excellent support for testing asynchronous code, including promises, async/await, and callbacks. It provides built-in utilities to handle async operations, such as async/await syntax for cleaner and more readable tests. In comparison, SuperTest is primarily aimed at testing synchronous code and does not have built-in support for handling async operations.
Test Runner: Jest comes with its own test runner, which means you can run your tests directly from the command line using the jest command. It provides a built-in watch mode that automatically re-runs tests when files change. SuperTest, being a library rather than a standalone framework, does not provide a test runner. You need to use a separate test runner like Mocha or Jasmine to execute tests written using SuperTest.

In summary, Jest provides a full-featured testing environment with built-in mocking and code coverage support, while SuperTest is focused on API testing and integrates with external assertion libraries.

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Advice on Jest, SuperTest

Dane

Feb 7, 2020

Needs adviceon

Cypress

Jest

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

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.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Jest	SuperTest
Jest provides you with multiple layers on top of Jasmine.	It is a super-agent driven library for testing node.js HTTP servers using a fluent API. It provides a high-level abstraction for testing HTTP, while still allowing you to drop down to the lower-level API provided by superagent.
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	HTTP assertions;Asynchronous;Promise support
Statistics
Stacks 15.2K	Stacks 1.9K
Followers 4.1K	Followers 102
Votes 175	Votes 0
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 Documentation 4 Ambiguous configuration 3 Difficult 2 Ambiguous 2 Multiple error messages for same error	No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to Jest, SuperTest?

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Ghost Inspector

It lets you create and manage UI tests that check specific functionality in your website or application. We execute these automated browser tests continuously from the cloud and alert you if anything breaks.

QUnit

QUnit is a powerful, easy-to-use JavaScript unit testing framework. It's used by the jQuery, jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile projects and is capable of testing any generic JavaScript code, including itself!