Instead of Cypress: Playwright

Why Playwright is better

• WebKit, the engine behind Safari, is a first-class Playwright target. In Cypress it is still marked experimental.
• Playwright runs outside the page, so one test can open several tabs, browser contexts and origins. Cypress runs inside the browser, cannot control more than 1 open browser at a time, and needs cy.origin for each other domain.
• Parallel runs and sharding (--shard=1/4) are built into the open-source runner. Cypress parallelization is a Cypress Cloud feature, and the free plan includes 500 test results a month.
• Tests are ordinary async code with await, and Playwright has bindings for Python, Java and .NET as well as JavaScript. Cypress tests are JavaScript only and use a chained command queue.
• Playwright has overtaken Cypress at work. In the State of JS 2024 survey, 3,674 respondents used Playwright professionally against 3,603 for Cypress.

When to keep Cypress

Keep Cypress if your team relies on its interactive runner with time-travel snapshots, on its component testing setup for your framework, or on Cypress Cloud's Test Replay and analytics. A working Cypress suite that covers Chrome is not by itself a reason to rewrite. If the job is scraping or scripting third-party sites, Cypress is the wrong tool and Playwright connected to Lightpanda does it with far less memory. Lightpanda has no Firefox or WebKit engine and no real screenshots, so cross-browser and visual tests still need Playwright's own browsers.

Switching

A rewrite of each test. cy.get(...).click() chains become await page.locator(...).click(), cy.intercept becomes page.route, and custom commands become fixtures or helper functions. Most teams write new tests in Playwright and move old ones over a few at a time.

Watch out

Playwright's component testing works differently from Cypress's. Each component test runs against a small story gallery page served by your own dev server, so porting component tests means writing those pages. Its UI mode and trace viewer cover the same ground as the Cypress runner but look and behave differently. It is controlled by Microsoft.

Also worth a look

• Lightpanda A headless browser without graphical rendering, driven by Puppeteer, Playwright or Selenium; use it when the job is scripting or scraping other people's sites, which Cypress's own docs say it is not built for.

More newer, better browser automation tools and headless browsers

• Puppeteer →, use Lightpanda
• Selenium →, use Playwright