Selenium and Cypress – Which one to choose?

As a Test Automation Consultant, I tend to play around with most of the latest test automation tools and frameworks that are available in the market to suggest the right toolset for my customers.

I have been using Selenium for more than eight years now, and I still agree that it’s a GREAT tool and it is being used for more than a decade by millions of testers. Many Selenium-based open source and commercial products are developed, and these tools leverage a couple of drawbacks which Selenium itself has like managing driver dependencies, Script-less record and playback etc.,

As rightly said in this “The era of Non-Selenium automation testing tools 2019” article, we can see many non-selenium based test frameworks started gaining attention in the industry. Some of them are Cypress, Puppeteer, TestCafe etc.,

In this article, I thought of publishing a couple of differences I have observed between Selenium and Cypress based on my personal experience. I have been using Cypress for over eight months now, and I must admit that the tool is amazing with frontend automation.

Please note that I am not taking any sides here on any tools and this comparison is entirely for the users to understand the pros and cons of various features which both the tools offer.

So, at the time of writing this article, the number of weekly downloads from npmjs is –

Key Differences:

Selenium and Cypress are built with a different architecture, purpose and audience in mind. Selenium mainly focuses on a Testers point of view, whereas Cypress focuses on both Front-end Developers & Testers.

Let’s now see the plus side of Selenium against Cypress –

Selenium	Cypress
TestNG, JUnit, nUnit, xUnit, Cucumber, Mocha etc.	Mocha
Remote execution	No Remote Execution Supported
Support for multiple tabs and cross domain testing	No direct multiple tabs support and only supports running tests in 1 domain
Excellent support for Cross-browser testing tools like BrowserStack, SauceLabs etc.,	No 3rd party cross-browser testing tools support
Excellent support for mobile testing like Appium	Mobile testing not possible
Excellent community support	Evolving community support

Now, let’s see the plus side of Cypress against Selenium –

Cypress	Selenium
Faster execution	Slower
No Driver Dependencies	Different WebDriver versions for different browser versions
Built-in Mock Server, Spies & Clocks	No Mocking support
XHR Validation Support	No XHR support, but can be achieved using 3rd party tools
Cypress Test Runner with features like Selector Playground, integration with Developer Tools	Selenium IDE (record and playback) is great, but not as good as Cypress
API Testing Support – End to End Testing Tool	No API Testing Support as Selenium is just a browser automation tool
Automatic retries	Implicit & explicit waits
Automatic screenshots & Videos	No automatic screenshots or videos
Easy install with one command	Installation of multiple components
Clear error messages	Error messages sometimes confusing (long stack trace errors)
Excellent documentation	Average documentation

Which one to choose?

Well, it completely depends on your requirement.

You can see where these tools stands in the Automation Pyramid.

In case if your application is a modern web-based and needs a common tool between Frontend Developers and Testers, Cypress is the best tool.

If your requirement is based on IE and needs access to external tools like SauceLabs, BrowserStack, then Selenium is better for you.

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Conclusion:

I hope this article gave you a glimpse of the differences between Cypress and Selenium. Always consider a tool that fulfils your requirements and think from the latest and longer-run perspective.

Happy Testing!!!