Cucumber vs TestCafe

Free tier available

Free and open source

Open source core. SmartBear sells CucumberStudio for collaborative scenario authoring, priced per user on request.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

The Cucumber libraries are open source and free.

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Smartbear · since 2008

Established

DevExpress · since 2016

• Shared vocabulary between product, QA and engineering when the practice is actually followed.
• Scenarios double as living documentation that stays honest because it executes.
• Available in every major language.

• Zero setup: no drivers, no browser downloads, works on any installed browser including mobile Safari on a real phone.
• Automatic waiting and stable selectors with very little configuration.
• Genuinely simple concurrency flag for parallel runs.

• Almost always adopted as a syntax rather than a collaboration practice, at which point it is pure overhead on top of your real tests.
• The step-definition layer is a second codebase to maintain and refactor.
• Gherkin obscures technical detail that developers need when a test fails.

• The proxy architecture occasionally breaks on apps with strict CSP, service workers or unusual auth flows.
• Smaller community and slower ecosystem growth than Playwright or Cypress.
• No component testing story.

Teams genuinely practising BDD with three-amigos sessions, not teams who just want prettier test names.

Small teams who want a working cross-browser suite with the least possible setup.