I was using mocha for a long time. I just moved to jest and found its excellent.

I am surprised no body mentioned Jest. Jest is probably the most complete framework that you can find out there. Comes with doms which is great for front-end. Comes with spies and mocks which is essential for unit testing. Comes with code coverage which is awesome.

Well, there's Jasmine.

I've worked with the following:

• Jasmine
• Mocha
• Tape
• Ava
• Karma
• Protractor

And some assert libs such as chaijs, expect.js, etc.

Karma is a testrunner (like wallaby).

Testframeworks are (for example):

• Tape
• Mocha
• Jasmine
• QUnit

I'm new to testing too, but I now two things:

Mocha works everywere. It's the universal tool.

Tape is easy to use and highly recommented.

I would start with mocha, but only because I did myself and never regretted it. I still use Mocha with chai.expect(). For front end I use Karma in addition, but that came after a while.

I assume you know about TDD? If not, do it in this direction (IMO):

1. Read about TDD
2. Use Mocha and Chai Expect as long as you can without any more fuss
3. When the time comes when you are used to Mocha and Chai Expect, you're REALLY tired of reloading three browsers manually every time you need to check if you fixed something, and you don't see another way out of it except automating stuff, read up on Karma. Configuring it is a bitch, and you'll run into sooo many edge cases. If you use ES6 and Babel in addition... Well, good luck, buddy! :)

HOWEVER: Once you've configured Karma for a project and it works, your workflow will go faster.