Cypress and Playwright: A Comparison

In this video, I compare the two E2E testing frameworks Cypress and Playwright.

It should give you enough information to make the right decision for your project.

0:00 Welcome
1:33 Technological Approach
16:32 Developer Experience
24:22 CI
33:06 Coding
51:19 Architecture & Extensibility
58:49 Misc. Features
1:04:24 Summary & Farewell

[fellogenfellogen]

This was the best framework comparison by far until this day.

Although I wasn't as sold on the maturity of Cypress. Mainly because, as you mentioned, there are a lot of edge cases and almost 100+ plugins that in some cases are required to solve them. For me, the amount of quirks and shift away from the nature of JS/TS was too much. Focusing on community support, there is almost one guy that covers these things (ex Cypress Developer?), Gleb Bahmutov. He has covered like 500+ videos, mostly tips and tricks for those weird quirks, and just to name it, he has courses about 20+ plugins for Cypress.

I will admit that for the early parts of creating tests and the first flow, yes, Cypress is still ahead of anything else. But when something more complex is going on, and we need to mix that asynchronous behavior or any other Cypress quirk, then it's almost over for a tester who started using this framework. Of course, then there are Gleb's videos and his plugins (they are great), but as you and also Gleb or any developer forget very so often, you are real, full-fledged developers with a vast amount of skills and a huge understanding of not only one framework but many programming languages. For guys like you, it's always like learning the differences and those quirks in the case of Cypress. But for let's say a manual tester who started learning JS and TS and now moves to the automation part and starts Cypress, the starting coding is, as you said, great and easy. But those people will potentially face a huge wall. And in most cases, as you also mentioned, locally Cypress will tell you (sometimes) that you messed up, like chainability with async and this order of execution etc.. But a solution for this comes only from tons of research and not pure understanding of the programming language.

For me, if there are experienced people on the team or project familiar with Cypress who could potentially assist someone new to the framework, then yes, Cypress doesn't lag far behind what Playwright offers. However, for manual testers and/or frontend developers accustomed to only working with JS/TS, things will get harsh after a while. The basics are also easy (PW), tho the learning curve is a bit steeper early on. Later, if you encounter any challenging issues, you're still mostly dealing with standard JS/TS.

I would also recommend to other viewers to check out your webinar with Manfred Steyer.

Although I initially focused on your channel for Cypress/Playwright content, I must say you are a very smart and eloquent person and you put grea amount of substantive information in your videos.

[denissidorenko]

Excellent overview. Detailed and concise.

[unhandledexception]

What a helpful comparison, and what deep knowledge of these frameworks the presenter has... very impressive

[i.j.]

Very thorough explanation of the major differences, with illustrative examples and background information. Thank you!

[ManyakSVK]

Hi! Amazing video with really good informations about topic. After few years with angular without any useful knowledge about testing (e2e, automated, ...) its hard to choose which framework is best for start in 2024. Now as tech lead i can say i will choose playwright because of easy to use, concurent jobs, no deps, performance and strong base via Microsoft (as you said). I think our experience with testing will grow more and more with possibilities of playwright. (Or maybe im wrong 😃 ).

Well done Rainer and thank you for really good work here

[Oleks-wnrt]

thank you, really great comparison. my take is that Cypress is easier to start with for some engineers who are not familiar with automation/coding yet.

[Tonaldo]

Cypress recorder is amazing extension :D so easy to make tests

[markodzelajlija]

First of all you for this great video !
I'm someone who was working with Selenium Web Driver for 3 years, then Pw for 2 years. On our new project client want to have e2e tests in Cypress. Our main debate is should we proceed with Page-Object-Model or to use Cypress custom commands and App action. From my point of view, i see only benefits of using POM. We made some demo and it's working great. For every QA team, it's really important to have reusability, maintainability, and readability of test code and that can only be done with POM. Do you think that it's bad approach to proceed with POM, are we doing anti-pattern ?

[drn]

Great video. But "recommended approach" for Cy PO are nuts. Who df using commands for add PO? You can easly create PO file (with selectors amd methods) with export class and import it to your test file

[anasouardini]

I've tried both selenium and playwright, my opinion is: Selenium is garbage; Playwright is only for unit-testing it sucks at scraping.
I'm currently learning Cypress, I hope I don't get disappointed again.