nose vs pytest - what are the (subjective) differences that should make me pick either? [closed]

I used to use Nose because it was the default with Pylons. I didn't like it at all. It had configuration tendrils in multiple places, virtually everything seemed to be done with an underdocumented plugin which made it all even more indirect and confusing, and because it did unittest tests by default, it regularly broke with Unicode tracebacks, hiding the sources of errors.

I've been pretty happy with py.test the last couple years. Being able to just write a test with assert out of the box makes me hate writing tests way less, and hacking whatever I need atop the core has been pretty easy. Rather than a fixed plugin interface it just has piles of hooks, and pretty understandable source code should you need to dig further. I even wrote an adapter for running Testify tests under py.test, and had more trouble with Testify than with py.test.

That said, I hear nose has plugins for classless tests and assert introspection nowadays, so you'll probably do fine with either. I still feel like I can hit the ground running with py.test, though, and I can understand what's going on when it breaks.