My experience using Cypress and Playwright: Pros and cons after years of use.

As a QA engineer, one of my main responsibilities when starting a project is to define the automation framework. To do this, I have worked with different frameworks, from Selenium and WebdriverIO to more modern tools like Cypress and Playwright.

Nowadays, I mainly use Cypress and Playwright. Both are great options, but at the same time, they have certain peculiarities that I consider important to know before deciding on one or the other. Here are the key points for me:

1. Setup and first steps

Neither of them is difficult to set up, and both have abundant documentation to get started.

Each has its official documentation [Cypress Doc, Playwright Doc], which I recommend consulting first. Other recommended places for searching information and support are their GitHub repositories [Cypress GitHub, Playwright GitHub] to see code examples and their official channels on various platforms (Cypress Discord, Playwright Discord) that allow communication with other developers.

Even so, I believe that Cypress, having been on the market for more years, stands out for the amount of existing documentation and its broader community compared to Playwright.

2. Simple vs. advanced scenarios

Nowadays, test scenarios are becoming increasingly complex, including multiple tabs in the browser, interactions with different contexts, and iframe elements.

If this sounds familiar to you, Playwright is ideal for advanced scenarios, as it natively handles multi-page testing and allows launching multiple contexts in the same instance. What do we mean by this? Let's look at an example:

We want to test a chat between two users. Thanks to this functionality, we can launch a single instance of the browser and create two user contexts with their respective sessions, to verify that the messages sent by one reach the other.

It also facilitates iframe management, making it very intuitive, unlike Cypress which can become a real headache by requiring the use of certain unfriendly workarounds.

On the other hand, Cypress works better for simple flows that do not require multiple tabs or iframes.

3. Speed

Both tools are fast, as they do not require a webdriver to interact with the browser. Even so, there is one aspect that gives Playwright the advantage: parallelism.

Playwright controls the browsers from the outside, which allows running parallel and multi-context tests natively, making better use of system resources.

Cypress, however, does not have this capability in its free desktop version. In paid versions, it is possible to enjoy parallelization, although with limitations on executions per month depending on the chosen plan.

4. Debugging

Both tools include their own debugging systems. For me, Cypress stands out for its more friendly and interactive interface, the possibility of taking screenshots and videos, and a very visual execution timeline.

Playwright also offers screenshots and videos of the executions, but its error tracing is more technical, based on logs and the trace viewer.

5. Browser support

If we are looking for a versatile framework, Playwright is the most complete option, providing support for browsers based on the Chromium engine (Chrome, Edge), Firefox, and Webkit (Safari). Additionally, by configuring the executablePath parameter with the path of the executable, it is possible to run tests on less known browsers such as Brave, Opera, or Vivaldi.

Cypress, instead, focuses more on Chrome, Edge, Electron, and Firefox, and may present problems with browsers other than those mentioned.

6. Artificial Intelligence

Both frameworks have started to incorporate AI-based functionalities to facilitate the creation and maintenance of tests.

Playwright comes included with 3 agents called planner, generator, and healer. You can generate them in your project, and through a code assistant like GitHub Copilot, you can give commands to them. Their main functions are:

• Planner: explores the application and plans the test execution.

• Generator: generates tests automatically.

• Healer: repairs tests that have failed, either due to broken selectors or changes in the UI.

Each agent can be launched independently according to what we need, and its use is completely free.

On the other hand, Cypress has created Cypress Prompt, a function that allows generating tests from natural language instructions. The downside is that it requires a Cypress Cloud account, and the number of uses is limited in the free plan.

A real example would be the following:

From my point of view, solely for the AI features, I don't think the paid version of Cypress is worth it, as the framework itself is completely free to use, and tools like cypress.prompt() are not perfect and can cause errors in complex scenarios.

However, if an organization is looking for a dashboard that shows results, needs cloud storage, or needs to parallelize executions, it might be worth taking a look.

Regarding the future, related to AI, both frameworks still need to improve but it shows they are on the right track. A great added value would be if the framework itself could analyze and record the most used flows by users, with the aim of prioritizing and focusing test coverage on the most critical areas of the system.