Cypress

Cypress made browser testing approachable. Its chainable API, time-travel debugging, and real-time test runner turned E2E testing from a chore into something developers actually enjoy writing. 49k stars and a massive test library ecosystem built on top.

But Playwright has overtaken it. Playwright is faster (290ms vs 420ms per action), supports all browsers natively (Cypress is Chromium-first), and includes free parallel execution. Selenium is the polyglot enterprise option with the broadest language and browser support.

Use Cypress if your team already knows it, your test suite is Chromium-focused, and you value the interactive test runner's developer experience — time-travel debugging is genuinely unmatched.

The catch: Cypress's in-browser execution architecture limits it to single-tab, single-origin testing. Cross-browser support is incomplete. Parallel execution requires Cypress Cloud, which can exceed $30k/year for enterprise teams — while Playwright offers this for free. For new projects in 2026, Playwright is the default recommendation. Cypress is for maintaining existing test suites, not starting new ones.