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Property-based testing and data providers serve different purposes in PHPUnit. Data providers test specific, documented examples with full test isolation between each data set, making them ideal for regression testing and documentation. Property-based testing explores the input space automatically by generating many test cases to discover edge cases you might not think of, but executes all iterations in a single test context without automatic isolation. A critical technical difference: PHPUnit creates a fresh test instance for each data provider set (running setUp/tearDown each time), but runs all property-based iterations within one test instance (setUp/tearDown only once). Best practice is to use both: properties for systematic exploration, then convert discovered failures into explicit data provider examples for regression testing.