We do a detailed Cypress vs. Selenium comparison to determine the core differences and help you evaluate Cypress and Selenium for your next test automation …
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Selenium is one of the most prominent automation frameworks for functional testing and web app testing. Automation testers who use Selenium can run tests across different browser and platform combinations by leveraging an online Selenium Grid. Though Selenium is the go-to framework for test automation, Cypress — a relatively late entrant in the test automation game — has been catching up at a breakneck pace. Like Selenium, Cypress is also an open-source test automation framework for testing web applications. And that’s where the big Cypress vs Selenium fight begins! Here are some of the most commonly asked questions that might come up when doing a Cypress vs. Selenium comparison: So many questions! In this blog, we do a detailed Cypress vs. Selenium comparison to determine the core differences between Selenium and Cypress. By the end of this blog, you should be in a better position to evaluate Cypress vs. Selenium for your next test automation project! To get started with Cypress vs. Selenium, we look at what features do these frameworks offer when it comes to web automation testing: To get started with the Cypress vs Selenium comparison, we first look at Selenium — the more established player in the web automation and cross-browser testing arena. Selenium is a popular open-source test automation framework primarily used for web app testing and cross-browser testing. Selenium WebDriver is one of the pivotal components of the Selenium suite, and it lets you drive the browser natively (either on local machines or remote machines). Selenium supports a range of programming languages like Python, Ruby, C#, JavaScript, Java, PHP, and more. It supports several test automation frameworks, including popular BDD frameworks — Behave, JUnit, SpecFlow, MSTest, TestNG, PyTest, PyUnit, Mocha JS, Jest, WebDriverIO, Protractor, and more. To get started with Selenium test automation, developers have to download corresponding browser drivers (e.g., ChromeDriver for Chrome, GeckoDriver for Firefox, etc.) and the appropriate Selenium language drivers on their machines. Cypress is a relatively new player in the arena of automation testing and web app testing. Like the Selenium framework, Cypress is also open-source, and the project is hosted on GitHub. Off late, Cypress has gained significant traction, as is evident from the number of forks and stars for the project. At the time of writing this blog, the latest version of Cypress was 5.5.0. The growing interest from the developers’ community is one of the primary reasons we’re doing this Cypress vs Selenium comparison. Cypress enables you to unit tests, write end-to-end tests, as well as integration tests. Unlike Selenium WebDriver that supports many languages, Cypress only supports JavaScript. Cypress is preferred by front-end developers and automation testers who are well-versed with JavaScript. In terms of support for test automation frameworks, Cypress only supports the Mocha JS framework. Hence, the tests written for web automation testing are written in JavaScript on top of the Mocha JS framework. The six-month download trend comparison of Selenium WebDriver and Cypress clearly indicates that Selenium vs Cypress battle will intensify in months to come. Cypress is catching up well with Selenium WebDriver, and this trend drives curiosity about the usefulness of these test automation frameworks. Now that we have briefly discussed what Selenium WebDriver and Cypress are, let’s look at these frameworks in a more detailed manner. The Selenium project was started way back in 2004, and it has come a long way since then! The Selenium IDE introduced in 2006 was a naive record and playback tool available only on Firefox. Along with Firefox, the latest Selenium IDE is also available for Chrome. It comes with cross-browser support and can be used for parallel testing. It is web-ready and also lets automation testers debug scripts by setting breakpoints. The latest stable version of Selenium is Selenium 3.141.59. However, Selenium WebDriver in Selenium 4 (which is still in the Alpha Stage) is a W3C recommendation, i.e., the JSON Wire protocol would no longer be used for communicating with the web browser. The automation tests would work more seamlessly across popular browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and more. Developers can expect a more stable and uniform behavior with Selenium 4 since the Selenium WebDriver and corresponding browsers use a common protocol (i.e., W3C protocol) for communication. These are some of the major positives of Selenium that can help Selenium win this Cypress vs Selenium battle: Though Selenium offers many advantages, it does have its share of shortcomings. Listed below are some of the most frequently reported shortcomings of Selenium: Cypress is a next-generation front-end testing tool built for the modern web. Cypress was built for addressing the major pain points faced by developers and QA engineers when coming up with test applications. Cypress lets you test anything that runs in a browser. With Cypress, developers can write end-to-end tests, integration tests, and unit tests. Cypress is built on JavaScript — the popular front-end language and only supports the Mocha JS framework. Chai — the popular BDD/TDD assertion library for NodeJS, is used for writing readable assertions with excellent error messages. Apart from support for programming languages, the other significant difference between Selenium and Cypress is architecture. Cypress is architecturally and fundamentally different from Selenium. We would touch upon these aspects at a later point in this Cypress vs Selenium comparison.
