Comparison of C++ unit test frameworks

A new player is Google Test (also known as Google C++ Testing Framework) which is pretty nice though.

#include <gtest/gtest.h>

TEST(MyTestSuitName, MyTestCaseName) {
    int actual = 1;
    EXPECT_GT(actual, 0);
    EXPECT_EQ(1, actual) << "Should be equal to one";
}

Main features:

• Portable
• Fatal and non-fatal assertions
• Easy assertions informative messages: ASSERT_EQ(5, Foo(i)) << " where i = " << i;
• Google Test automatically detects your tests and doesn't require you to enumerate them in order to run them
• Make it easy to extend your assertion vocabulary
• Death tests (see advanced guide)
• SCOPED_TRACE for subroutine loops
• You can decide which tests to run
• XML test report generation
• Fixtures / Mock / Templates...

I've just pushed my own framework, Catch2, out there. It's still under development but I believe it already surpasses most other frameworks. Different people have different criteria but I've tried to cover most ground without too many trade-offs. Take a look at my linked blog entry for a taster. My top five features are:

• Header only
• Auto registration of function and method based tests
• Decomposes standard C++ expressions into LHS and RHS (so you don't need a whole family of assert macros).
• Support for nested sections within a function based fixture
• Name tests using natural language - function/method names are generated

It also has Objective-C bindings. The project is hosted on Github

See this question for some discussion.

They recommend the articles: Exploring the C++ Unit Testing Framework Jungle, By Noel Llopis. And the more recent: C++ Test Unit Frameworks

I have not found an article that compares googletest to the other frameworks yet.