Im interested if anyone has experience using node's native test runner in a non-trivial project?

We are not using the module mocks from Jest in our project and a quick PoC showed significant (3x) speed improvement, but i am worried about the battle-tested:ness.

I just started to use nodejs test runner in a new project. All configuration is basically:

node --experimental-transform-types --experimental-test-module-mocks --env-file test/test.env --test

It then automatically runs all my test/*.tests.ts files.

So nice to get rid of all that extra config. As this is still a tiny project, I can tolerate some API changes in these experimental features.

My experience using built in node:test and other rapidly evolving things is frustration around getting improvements. I test one of my projects with the oldest supported NodeJS version, and simply can’t use node:test there because the old node:test in Node 18 is missing a lot of features. It’s similar to building for Apple’s platforms - great stuff happens every new major version, but there’s no way to use new libraries with older OS versions. Gotta wait for all your users (and yourself) to update your whole runtime to get those new features.

Maybe if you are on Node 23 and you absolutely have everything you need, then node:test is okay, but I DO NOT recommend it.

I've been very happy with node:test (and deno:test), but also I migrated from mostly mocha as jest I found difficult to configure, especially without unnecessary bundling configurations as the ESM support among other things was broken for far too long (but mocha delivered it well). Most of my successful uses of jest were out-of-the-box configs in create-react-app and the Angular tools to strip uses of karma and replace them with jest. (Side rant: Seriously whoever thought that karma was a good idea for a test runner? "I love V8 so much I'm using Node's V8 to spin up another headless Chromium's V8 so I can V8 from inside V8." lolsob)

Yes we're using the built-in test runner and it's much better than jest.

Jest is full of unneeded magic (= complexity), whereas node:test is straightforward and has a better design. Highly recommended. You can turn off process isolation for extra speedup!