Cypress

The model

Cypress runs tests inside the browser alongside your application, rather than driving it from outside through WebDriver. That gives it direct access to the DOM and the network layer, which is why its debugging story is good: the test runner records a snapshot at every step and you can click back through them to see exactly what the page looked like when an assertion failed.

Automatic waiting comes from the same design. Cypress retries assertions until they pass or time out, which removes the explicit sleeps that make hand-written Selenium suites brittle.

Where the architecture costs you

Running inside the browser is also the constraint. Cross-origin navigation, multiple tabs and multiple browsers in a single test are awkward or unsupported, because the test and the app share an execution context. Playwright drives the browser from outside and handles those cases natively.

Browser coverage reflects this too — Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Electron are solid, Safari support arrived later and remains less complete than Playwright's WebKit.

Pricing

The Cypress App is MIT licensed and free, and running the full suite locally or in your own CI costs nothing. Cypress Cloud is the paid SaaS layer for recording runs, parallelising across machines and analysing flake.

Cloud Starter is free with 10 users, 500 test results a month and 100 prompt executions. Team is $67/month billed annually at $799, covering 50 users and 120k test results a year. Business is $267/month, billed annually at $3,199, with the same 50 users and test results but 24k prompt executions. Enterprise is quoted and includes 1.8M test results a year.

Note that Team and Business carry the same user and test-result allowances — the gap between them is features and prompt executions, not scale.

Current standing

Cypress remains widely deployed with strong documentation and a mature plugin ecosystem. Momentum in new projects has shifted toward Playwright, which is free in full including parallelisation and handles the multi-origin cases Cypress struggles with. For an existing Cypress suite that works, there is little reason to migrate; for a greenfield project, the comparison is worth making deliberately.