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Asked: 2026-05-13T22:19:27+00:00

This question has been asked in various forms in a number of different forums,

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This question has been asked in various forms in a number of different forums, but, IMHO, I haven’t been able to find a place where it’s really answered clearly, so I’m going to reframe it and ask it again.

I work in a basically Microsoft Shop. We use TFS, and all of our developers have MSDN subscriptions including the Team Suite edition of VS. So we have access to MSTest.

I’ve read the various NUnit vs. MSTest comparisons, and the developer community seems to pretty much overwhelmingly choose NUnit. But the reasons given don’t ever seem to be overwhelming or compelling, at least to our situation. (NUnit is updated more often, NUnit is faster, NUnit doesn’t require TFS, etc.)

I can use NUnit if I choose, but the use of open source software without a formal support behind it has to be defended. I need a fairly compelling reason to do so.

What I basically have to answer to justify using NUnit in preference to MSTest is this: is there anything that I can do in NUnit that I can’t do with comparable effort in MSTest?

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  1. Editorial Team
    • NUnit contains a [TestCase] attribute that allows implementing parametrized tests. This does not exist out of the box in MSTest – it can be done via extensibility though.
    • MsTest’s ExpectedException attribute has a bug where the expected message is never really asserted even if it’s wrong – the test will pass.
    • NUnit ships with an Assert.Throws API to allow testing an exception on a specific line of code instead of the whole method. A similar feature exists for MSTest (implemented by the same person who did it for NUnit) but does not ship with MSTest.
    • NUnit contains a fluent version of Assert API out of the box. MSTest has third party extensions that do this, but none are shipped with MSTest.
    • NUnit allows abstract classes to be test fixtures (so you can inherit test fixtures). MsTest allows this but limits abstract classes to a single assembly.
    • NUnit allows non public classes to be test fixtures (as of the latest version)
    • NUnit was created SOLELY for the idea of unit testing. MSTest was created for Testing – and also a bit of unit testing.
    • NUnit contains PNunit (running parallel tests with NUnit). MSTest added this ability in Visual Studio 2010 which is configurable via XML
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