unittest vs nose

PyUnit has been a part of the Python standard library since version 2.1 as the unittest module. This makes it widely available to developers without the need to install additional modules since it's coming out of the box with Python.

The way tests are run is through:
if name == 'main':
unittest.main()

Then unittest.main() builds a TestSuite object that contains all the tests that have method names starting with "test", then a TextTestRunnerwhich then executes each method and prints the results.

But individual test cases can be executed simply by specifying their names on the terminal:

python unittest_program.py testProgram.testGetFeedPostingHost

The default output is usually pretty concise, but it can be more verbose simply by adding a -v flag in the end when calling the test from the command line.

So unittest can be considered pretty flexible when it comes to test case execution.

Since pyUnit is a derivative of xUnit and it's quite similar to other xUnit frameworks, it's quite easy for people with not much Python background to relate to.

Unittest reports tests duration in milliseconds

Nose wraps around unittest, adding some more feature and functionality to it, such as SkipTest or auto-discovery.

Nose tries to keep boilerplate code to a minimum. As such, it's very easy to read and write initial tests.

There's a large number of plugins available for nose which make unit testing easier. Things like coverage reporting, test selection and xUnit-compatible test output can be added through plugins.