Behat vs PHPUnit comparison of testing frameworks
What are the differences between Behat and PHPUnit?

	Behat https://docs.behat.org/en/latest/	PHPUnit https://phpunit.de/
Programming language	PHP	PHP
Category	Functional/Acceptance Testing	Unit Testing
General info	Behat is an open source Behavior-Driven Development framework for PHP. Behat uses the StoryBDD subtype of behaviour-driven development (the other subtype is SpecBDD); This means the tests we write with Behat look rather like stories than code. It is inspired by Ruby's Cucumber	PHPUnit is a unit testing framework for the PHP programming language PHPUnit is a programmer-oriented testing framework and is an instance of the xUnit architecture for unit testing frameworks.
xUnit Set of frameworks originating from SUnit (Smalltalk's testing framework). They share similar structure and functionality.	No	Yes It's an instance of the xUnit architecture for unit testing frameworks
Client-side Allows testing code execution on the client, such as a web browser	Yes To enable Behat to test a website, you need to add Mink and a browser emulator (selenium maybe, though slow) to the mix. Mink methods are the connector between Behat and an extensive list of available drivers, and they provide a consistent testing API.	Yes It can perform Unit tests and can test various front-end components and behaviours
Server-side Allows testing the bahovior of a server-side code	Yes Behat can be used for Data Integrity Testing to verify that database operations are functioning properly	Yes By performing unit tests on singular back-end components
Fixtures Allows defining a fixed, specific states of data (fixtures) that are test-local. This ensures specific environment for a single test	Yes One can use the 'Doctrinefixturesbundle' to create the required fixture loaders and load them in our Behat scenarios when required, using the 'BeforeScenario' hook.	Yes By use of a setup code. The setup code consists of two Important template functions, the 'setUp()' function (called to create the objects to be tested) and 'tearDown()' function (called to cleanup the objects which you tested)
Group fixtures Allows defining a fixed, specific states of data for a group of tests (group-fixtures). This ensures specific environment for a given group of tests.	Yes Behat allows for group fixtures	Yes It does support group fixtures
Generators Supports data generators for tests. Data generators generate input data for test. The test is then run for each input data produced in this way.	By use of third party libraries like moodle-behat-generators	N/A
Licence Licence type governing the use and redistribution of the software	MIT License	Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License
Mocks Mocks are objects that simulate the behavior of real objects. Using mocks allows testing some part of the code in isolation (with other parts mocked when needed)	By using third party libraries like Mock and Prophecy	Yes One of its main features is that PHPUnit comes with out of the box support for Mock objects
Grouping Allows organizing tests in groups	Yes You can use tags to group features and scenarios together, independent of your file and directory structure	Yes It allows grouping of tests and by using the @group annotation one can tag a test to belong to one or more groups
Other Other useful information about the testing framework