Unitils is a collection of utilities that target in particular database testing. The problem mentioned above occurs there too.

http://unitils.org/tutorial.html Shows the following alternative solution:
assertReflectionEquals(Arrays.asList(1, 2, 3), myList, LENIENT_ORDER);

I have long held the view, that you should avoid default values like null, and for numerics, 0 in database tests. In fact I usually write my test data classes so that they will reject such values. Here is another handy utility in that space:
assertReflectionEquals(expectedUser, actualUser, IGNORE_DEFAULTS);