doctest VS Google Test

Compare doctest vs Google Test and see what are their differences.

doctest

The fastest feature-rich C++11/14/17/20/23 single-header testing framework (by doctest)

Google Test

GoogleTest - Google Testing and Mocking Framework (by google)
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doctest Google Test
19 67
5,523 32,542
1.8% 1.5%
0.0 8.3
14 days ago 4 days ago
C++ C++
MIT License BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

doctest

Posts with mentions or reviews of doctest. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-05-07.
  • Unit testing tool suggestions
    2 projects | /r/learnprogramming | 7 May 2023
    I have never used "tools" for unit-tests, only web sites that show the results of the tests or code coverage. For C++ I prefer https://github.com/doctest/doctest but most companies I worked for use Catch2.
  • Memory Safety in the D Programming Language (Part 2 of N)
    2 projects | /r/programming | 8 Oct 2022
    This is, honestly, super easy to get going. Nowadays you have a ton of libraries and more-than-decent build systems. With Meson/CMake and Conan/Vcpkg I can set up a project with testing in 3 minutes. Also, I think that at the end of the day you want your tests to live somewhere else. But if you want to embed them, you also have https://github.com/doctest/doctest.
  • Testing framework Catch2 3.0 final released
    3 projects | /r/cpp | 17 May 2022
    Keep in mind https://github.com/doctest/doctest/issues/554. Also, doctest lacks: - Matchers - Data generators - Benchmarking - ...
  • The Lisp Curse
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Mar 2022
    I like working in C++, after a decade of working in Java, Python, Javascript and Clojure, I find working in C++ (which I learned before these other languages) to be quite fun and pleasant, at least with relatively modern C++.

    I've been, on and off, working on a little toy game engine, for a few years. Its a mix of keeping up with C++ advancements, learning various concepts like physically based rendering, and just the fun of crafting a big project, with no constraints other than my time and ability, no deadlines, no expectation of releasing anything. Its cathartic and enjoyable. I really do enjoy it.

    Last September, I got frustrated with something I was working on in a more serious capacity. It was some server software, it responded to HTTP requests, it accessed third party services over HTTP and Websockets, it talked to a Postgres database. Overall it was an event driven system that transformed data and generated actions that would be applied by talking to third party services. The "real" version was written in Clojure and it worked pretty well. I really like Clojure, so all good.

    But because I was frustrated with some things about how it ran and the resources it took up, I wondered what it would be like if I developed a little lean-and-mean version in C++. So I gave it a try as a side project for a few weeks. I used doctest[1] for testing, immer[2] for Clojure-like immutable data structures, [3] lager for Elm-like application state and logic management, Crow[4] for my HTTP server, ASIO[5] and websocketpp[6] for Websockets, cpp-httplib[7] as a HTTP client and PGFE[8] for Postgres, amongst some other little utility libraries. I also wrote it in a Literate Programming style using Entangled[9], which helped me keep everything well documented and explained.

    For the most part, it worked pretty well. Using immer and lager helped keep the logic safe and to the point. The application started and ran very quickly and used very little cpu or memory. However, as the complexity grew, especially when using template heavy libraries like lager, or dealing with complex things like ASIO, it became very frustrating to deal with errors. Template errors even on clang became incomprehensible and segmentation faults when something wasn't quite right became pretty hard to diagnose. I had neither of these problems working on my game engine, but both became issues on this experiment. After a few weeks, I gave up on it. I do think I could have made it work and definitely could go back and simplify some of the decisions I made to make it more manageable, but ultimately, it was more work than I had free time to dedicate to it.

    So my experience was that, yes, you can write high level application logic for HTTP web backends in C++. You can even use tools like immer or lager to make it feel very functional-programming in style and make the application logic really clean. Its not hard to make it run efficiently both in terms of running time and memory usage, certainly when comparing to Clojure or Python. However, I found that over all, it just wasn't as easy or productive as either of those languages and I spent more time fighting the language deficiencies, even with modern C++, than I do when using Clojure or Python.

    I think I would think very long and hard before seriously considering writing a web backend in C++. If I had the time, I'd love to retry the experiment but using Rust, to see how it compares.

    [1] https://github.com/doctest/doctest

    [2] https://github.com/arximboldi/immer

    [3] https://github.com/arximboldi/lager

    [4] https://github.com/CrowCpp/crow

    [5] https://think-async.com/Asio/

    [6] https://www.zaphoyd.com/projects/websocketpp/

    [7] https://github.com/yhirose/cpp-httplib

    [8] https://github.com/dmitigr/pgfe

    [9] https://entangled.github.io/

  • C++17 python like print function
    4 projects | /r/embedded | 9 Mar 2022
    For stuff like this which is very easy to test (very predefined input vs output), I highly suggest using some testing framework. Catch2 is great, but there is also doctest and good ole googletest. If you do this, it would also be a great intro to CI, where you do some plumbing on github or gitlab where every commit causes a build to happen on their servers and run through the unit tests, and if it passes it gets merged into master.
  • How to unit test
    8 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 9 Feb 2022
    doctest is my favorite framework. Really simple to use, header only, supports compile-time tests, lots of features and it works well with cmake.
    8 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 9 Feb 2022
    I haven't used it, but I've heard that doctest is also quite good: https://github.com/doctest/doctest
  • Unit testing and mocking for c++
    6 projects | /r/cpp | 19 Oct 2021
    I usually use doctest with trompeloeil.
  • Best IDE For C++ OpenGL?
    2 projects | /r/opengl | 14 Sep 2021
    I use doctest for unit testing.
  • Python 3 Types in the Wild: A Tale of Two Type Systems [pdf]
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Apr 2021
    Even aside from deliberate backwards-compatibility breaks in the standard, compilers sometimes break compatibility. Both MSVC and GCC 11 have changed their header file transitive includes within the past few years, causing projects (like doctest and Qt5) to stop compiling because they forgot to include headers, which built fine in the past but not anymore. IDK if it's "very common", but it's definitely happening in the wild.

    MSVC: https://github.com/onqtam/doctest/issues/183

    GCC:

    - https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qtbase/-/commit/8252ef5fc6d0430...

    - https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qtbase/-/commit/cb2da673f53815a...

Google Test

Posts with mentions or reviews of Google Test. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-11.
  • Creating k-NN with C++ (from Scratch)
    6 projects | dev.to | 11 Jan 2024
    cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.5) project(knn_cpp CXX) include(FetchContent) FetchContent_Declare( googletest GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/google/googletest.git GIT_TAG release-1.11.0 ) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(googletest) FetchContent_Declare(matplotplusplus GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/alandefreitas/matplotplusplus GIT_TAG origin/master) FetchContent_GetProperties(matplotplusplus) if(NOT matplotplusplus_POPULATED) FetchContent_Populate(matplotplusplus) add_subdirectory(${matplotplusplus_SOURCE_DIR} ${matplotplusplus_BINARY_DIR} EXCLUDE_FROM_ALL) endif() function(knn_cpp_test TEST_NAME TEST_SOURCE) add_executable(${TEST_NAME} ${TEST_SOURCE}) target_link_libraries(${TEST_NAME} PUBLIC matplot) aux_source_directory(${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/../lib LIB_SOURCES) target_link_libraries(${TEST_NAME} PRIVATE gtest gtest_main gmock gmock_main) target_include_directories(${TEST_NAME} PRIVATE ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR} ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/../) target_sources(${TEST_NAME} PRIVATE ${LIB_SOURCES} ) include(GoogleTest) gtest_discover_tests(${TEST_NAME}) endfunction() knn_cpp_test(LinearAlgebraTest la_test.cc) knn_cpp_test(KnnTest knn_test.cc) knn_cpp_test(UtilsTest utils_test.cc)
  • Starting with C
    2 projects | dev.to | 1 Jan 2024
    Okay, time to start unit tests!!! We will use Unity Test Framework to do unit testing. It is one of widely used testing frameworks alongside with Check, Google Test etc. Just downloading source code, and putting it to the project folder is enough to make it work (that is also why it is portable).
  • Automatically run tests, formatters & linters with CI!
    5 projects | dev.to | 15 Nov 2023
    Roy's project uses Google Test, a C++ testing framework. His testing setup is similar to mine as we both keep source files in one directory and tests in another. The key difference is that I can run the tests using the Visual Studios run button. It was fairly easy to write the new tests as there were existing ones that I could reference to check the syntax!
  • C++ Unit Testing Using Google Test - My Experience
    3 projects | dev.to | 12 Nov 2023
    One popular C++ Testing Framework is Google Test, and is what I ended up using.
    3 projects | dev.to | 12 Nov 2023
    The Google Test Documentation provides a primer for first-time users. The primer introduces some basic concepts and terminology, some of which I've been able to learn for this lab exercise.
  • Basic C++ Unit Testing with GTest, CMake, and Submodules
    2 projects | dev.to | 26 Sep 2023
    > git submodule add https://github.com/google/googletest.git > git submodule update --init --recursive
  • CI/CD pipelines for embedded
    2 projects | /r/embedded | 15 May 2023
    Not sure about CppUnit but I can speak to my previous experience using the googletest framework which compiles your tests to an executable, and since it's a very simple framework we were able to cross-compile and run directly on our device. We just had to hook up a device to the server that was running the CI so it could flash it when needed. That basically meant that our process was:
  • Basic CMake question regarding subdirectories
    2 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 19 Apr 2023
  • IDE for CPP(leetcode)
    4 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 3 Jan 2023
    However, you can use a unit test framework like GoogleTest or Catch2 whic creates a main() function for you which allows you to run single functions, as long as they have been created through some preprocessor macros. Then you can use a VS Code test adapter like this or this which may let you run a single test by right clicking it directly in VS Code.
  • New to C++
    2 projects | /r/cpp | 20 Dec 2022
    Make sure you write unit tests, I use gtest but catch2 is also good.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing doctest and Google Test you can also consider the following projects:

Catch - A modern, C++-native, test framework for unit-tests, TDD and BDD - using C++14, C++17 and later (C++11 support is in v2.x branch, and C++03 on the Catch1.x branch)

Boost.Test - The reference C++ unit testing framework (TDD, xUnit, C++03/11/14/17)

CppUTest - CppUTest unit testing and mocking framework for C/C++

CppUnit - C++ port of JUnit

Unity Test API - Simple Unit Testing for C

benchmark - A microbenchmark support library

UnitTest++ - A lightweight unit testing framework for C++

fff - A testing micro framework for creating function test doubles

Google Mock

spdlog - Fast C++ logging library.

Vcpkg - C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS