Playwright vs Cypress: it’s a question that many teams ask themselves at the start of a project. Does one offer significant benefits over the other?
Of course, this might depend on team preference. If your engineers are much more experienced in Cypress, for example, that’s what you’ll lean towards. Which makes sense – no point in slowing things down if it adequately meets your needs.
If you’re starting from a blank slate, however, it’s harder to make a decision. Here’s what to bear in mind when choosing between Playwright, Cypress, or something else entirely.
Playwright vs Cypress: A Quick Overview
We owe a lot to Cypress, conceptually. Its simplicity, intuitive developer experience, and ahead-of-the-curve features helped teams create tighter feedback loops and break down several barriers to engineer-led testing.
Playwright, created later by the team behind Puppeteer, is designed for scale, speed, and flexibility. It offers built-in support for multiple browsers, multiple tabs/contexts, and a range of test creation tools with test-level parallelization features.
Both are very good at the following – we’ll take these as a given in our analysis and focus on some differences instead:
- End-to-end UI testing
- API testing
- Component testing across many modern frameworks
- CI integration
- Screenshots/videos and tracing
- A mature user community and extensive documentation
Playwright vs Cypress: Engineer Experience and Features
Cypress: Frictionless Adoption and Ease of Use
Product teams love how easy Cypress is to use and how quickly they can get productive. The platform’s headline features include:
- Intuitive command syntax (cy.get, cy.click, etc.)
- Automatic waiting and retries by default
- Interactive GUI runner that shows DOM snapshots and command timelines
- Batteries-included configuration and tooling
- Strong documentation with real-world patterns
Cypress is set up with a way of doing things in mind. If you’re all about flexibility as an engineer, this might not work for you. Equally, it does guide new users nicely toward common testing best practices without forcing them to think too deeply about configuration, runners, or execution models.
Playwright: More Power, Steeper Learning Curve
Playwright is generally a more powerful tool and offers more flexibility in configuration. The trade-off is a steeper learning curve and a moderately less intuitive UX overall – though this is by no means unworkable, especially if your team has prior Selenium/Puppeteer experience.
With Playwright, engineers benefit from:
- Async/await patterns
- Concepts like contexts, frames, and multiple tabs
- Cross-browser and device profiles
- Core configuration choices up-front
The Verdict
Cypress’ frictionless adoption works well for:
- Smaller teams are tight on resources
- Teams where engineers test their own code
- Teams are new to automated testing
Playwright’s more flexible approach will suit:
- Teams with test automation experience
- Full-stack or polyglot orgs
- Companies with multiple browsers or markets to support
Playwright vs Cypress: Architecture and Browser Support
Cypress: Excellent Chromium-First Experience
Whilst Cypress does offer cross-browser test execution, Chromium is where it really excels. Cypress runs inside the browser, offering deep DOM insight into Chrome and Edge web apps, and fast, accurate debugging thanks to UI screenshots.
It has cross-browser ability, but teams expecting full parity with native engine automation will sometimes encounter differences or limitations, especially around WebKitSafari automation or multiple tabs.
Playwright: More Extensive Cross-Browser Automation
Playwright runs tests in Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox. Teams that work across browsers will appreciate its emphasis on feature parity and consistent behavior across engines. It also offers:
- Multiple tabs and popups
- Realistic mobile emulation
- Handling downloads and native dialogs
- Context isolation for parallel tests
The Verdict
Cypress provides adequate cross-browser support; Playwright provides excellent cross-browser support. If you support Safari, embedded browsers, or complex enterprise authentication flows, Playwright is the clear winner. However, Cypress’s in-browser architecture (and the insights this unlocks) means that it’s a stronger choice for Chromium-only teams.
Playwright vs Cypress: Parallelization, Performance, and CI/CD Integration
Cypress: Strong Cloud Ecosystem; Simpler Experience
Cypress relies on CI-orchestrated parallel runs that distribute spec files across machines using the --parallel flag, with a recorded run (typically via Cypress Cloud) to coordinate and load balance test execution. This means:
- Concurrent spec runs across CI agents
- Faster runs for large test suites by splitting work among runners
- Automatic load-balancing based on past durations.
You’ll likely need Cypress Cloud (Cypress’ proprietary SaaS layer) for orchestration and insights, as this is not done at test level – or you can build your own orchestration in CI. And, because Cypress executes inside the browser, scaling effectively may mean provisioning more CI machines and careful test splitting.
This can significantly reduce CI times for large suites; the trade-off is that it’s less flexible than CLI-controlled, per-test parallelism or sharding (which Playwright allows you to do).
Playwright: Built for Parallel, Distributed Execution
Playwright builds parallelism into its processes at test, file, and project level. You can run parallel tests through the CLI, or use native test sharding to automatically split suites across machines or CI nodes, for distributed execution of large test volumes.
Playwright’s architecture also supports running the same tests across multiple browsers and devices in parallel, while keeping configuration centralized in a single test runner. This makes it a generally more flexible option than Cypress, with easier scaling.
The Verdict
If you’re scaling aggressively, are operating very large regression suites, or run complex CI pipelines, you’ll find Playwright’s flexibility and test-level parallelism beneficial. Cypress will suit teams with small to moderate test suites where each spec is already a self-contained piece of work – such as product/feature teams with a focused UI area, or teams running in simple CI setups.
Playwright vs Cypress: Test Authoring and Readability
Both solutions allow you to minimize time spent creating tests with record-and-playback features that automatically generate test code, either via Codegen/Inspector (Playwright) or Cypress Studio (Cypress).
Both Cypress and Playwright produce readable JavaScript/TypeScript, though there are a few key differences between the platforms.
Cypress’ Test Authoring
- Command-queue syntax
- Implicit waits
- Chainable commands (cy.get(...).click())
This makes Cypress tests extremely readable for beginners – but you’ll be locked into Cypress’ ‘command queue’ model, which differs slightly from normal JavaScript.
Playwright’s Test Authoring
- Async/await everywhere
- Explicit waits when needed
- More procedural test flow
Playwright tests feel more like regular TypeScript code as a result. SDET teams and engineers who want more control over test formats tend to like this style a little more.
Playwright vs Cypress: A Redundant Question Nowadays?
Cypress and Playwright were both ahead of their time – but technology moves on.
For modern software engineering teams under constant pressure to release more and release faster, Cypress and Playwright are no longer the Lamborghinis of the software testing game. Modern AI-first testing platforms – such as Momentic – are redefining the model of how tests are created, maintained, and executed. Here’s why.
Natural Language Test Creation Saves Time
Both Cypress and Playwright require some level of coding knowledge for most effective use – even with low-code wrappers, the fundamental artifact is still code. Time spent coding tests is less time spent coding features.
Natural language test creation allows you to write tests in seconds in plain English. It’s as simple as typing:
“Log in as a returning user, search for ‘wireless headphones,’ add the cheapest item to cart, and verify checkout totals.”
This makes it much easier for engineers to test as they go (and therefore take a ‘shift left’ approach which catches defects earlier and speeds up release cycles). It also opens testing up to product managers, QA analysts, and other non-developers.
Cypress and Playwright are catching up with this capability – Cypress has recently released cy.prompt for natural language creation as an experimental feature, for example. But why rely on experimental features when mature, proven solutions are available right now?
Intent-Based Locators Help Self-Healing and Minimize Maintenance
Cypress and Playwright both rely heavily on CSS selectors, data-test attributes, ARIA labels, and XPath. No matter how disciplined your team is, this creates a large maintenance workload, as selectors break when you update your UI – even for small changes.
AI-native tools like Momentic use intent-based locators. These use a range of element attributes such as semantic meaning, visual hierarchy, and surrounding text to update tests with changes in the DOM, and dramatically reduce flakiness/maintenance burden.
Agentic AI closes the loop between flaky tests and maintenance
When tests fail in Playwright and Cypress, it’s on your team to figure out what’s wrong, debug the code, and rewrite the selectors or timing logic.
Using autonomous AI agents to observe failure patterns, infer the cause, suggest fixes, then automatically update test documentation saves your team a ton of time. And that’s not all they can do. Agentic AI features can also assist with exploratory testing, identify critical user flows, and generate tests on their own, getting smarter the more you use them.
You can integrate Playwright and Cypress with some AI solutions – but it takes time and effort, and you’ll face all the usual issues with third-party plugins. Why bother when you could choose an AI-native testing platform with the functionality built in and ready to go?
Momentic: AI Software Testing that Beats Playwright and Cypress
"It’s like giving someone your QA checklist and watching them execute it for you."
Sriram Sundarraj (Engineering Lead, Retool)
We’re not exaggerating – Momentic’s AI testing features really are that powerful. That’s why Retool managed to 4x their release cadence and save over 40 engineering hours per month.
Book a demo today to level up your software testing game.
