Pest is a PHP testing framework built on top of PHPUnit, designed with simplicity and developer experience in mind. Created by Nuno Maduro, it aims to bring joy back to PHP testing with a more elegant and expressive syntax. Pest's syntax is inspired by Ruby's RSpec and Jest, making tests easier to read and write.
Key features of Pest include a cleaner, more readable syntax compared to PHPUnit, an intuitive expectation API, and parallel testing capabilities for faster execution. It also offers features like architectural testing, code coverage reports, native profiling tools, and a watch mode for automatic test execution upon code changes. Pest is open source, operating under the MIT license, encouraging community contributions. It seamlessly integrates with Laravel projects and is recommended by many Laravel developers.
While specific pricing details for Pest itself are not applicable as it is an open-source framework, courses and plugins related to Pest may have associated costs. Pest is readily available for installation via Composer, a PHP dependency manager. As of late 2025, Pest is used in over 50,000 projects on GitHub, indicating its growing adoption in the PHP development community.