Knapsack Pro

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

PHPUnit

https://phpunit.de/

Mocha

https://mochajs.org
Programming language

PHP

JavaScript

Category

Unit Testing

Unit Testing, Intergration Testing, End-to-End Testing

General info

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.

Mocha is a widely used JavaScript test framework for Node.js

Mocha is a simple, flexible and the one of the widely adopted JS test framework. Mocha usually runs tests serially which enables the accurate reporting. Also it's useful for asynchronous testing, and provides various king of test reports. Spec is default test reporter for mocha, there are many test reports like Nyan, Dot matrix, Tap, Landing strip, List and Progress. Mocha is being used with many other test frameworks like Selenium WebDriver, Webdriver.io, wd and Cypress
xUnit
Set of frameworks originating from SUnit (Smalltalk's testing framework). They share similar structure and functionality.

Yes

It's an instance of the xUnit architecture for unit testing frameworks

Yes

It has an XUnit reporter available which outputs an XUnit-compatible XML document, often applicable in CI servers.
Client-side
Allows testing code execution on the client, such as a web browser

Yes

It can perform Unit tests and can test various front-end components and behaviours

Yes

Mocha Runs in the browser and is used widely to test front-end components and functionality. It can test various DOM elements, front-end functions and so on.
Server-side
Allows testing the bahovior of a server-side code

Yes

By performing unit tests on singular back-end components

Yes

Mocha provides convenient ways of testing the Node server.It works well with Chai (an assertion library) where it provides the environment for writing server-side tests while we write the tests with Chai
Fixtures
Allows defining a fixed, specific states of data (fixtures) that are test-local. This ensures specific environment for a single test

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)

Mocha provides the hooks before(), after(), beforeEach(), and afterEach() to set up preconditions and clean up after your tests
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

It does support group fixtures

N/A

Mocha allows grouping of 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.

N/A

Licence
Licence type governing the use and redistribution of the software

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

MIT 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)

Yes

One of its main features is that PHPUnit comes with out of the box support for Mock objects

Provides Mocking capabilities through third party libraries like sinon.js, simple-mock and nock
Grouping
Allows organizing tests in groups

Yes

It allows grouping of tests and by using the @group annotation one can tag a test to belong to one or more groups

Yes

Grouping is supported and is accomplished by the using a nested 'describe()'
Other
Other useful information about the testing framework