Cypress vs Nightwatch.js

From $75 per month (Cloud, entry team plan)

Free and open source

You only pay for Cypress Cloud. Costs scale with recorded test results, so a large suite on every PR is the expensive shape.

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

The test runner is free forever. Cypress Cloud free tier covers a limited number of recorded test results per month.

Everything, self-hosted

Category standard

Cypress.io · since 2017

Established

BrowserStack · since 2014

• The interactive runner is the best onboarding experience in E2E testing; a new developer writes a passing test in minutes.
• Excellent documentation and one of the largest plugin ecosystems.
• Component testing and E2E in one tool with one config.

• Everything included: runner, assertions, page objects, reporting, parallelism.
• Very readable chained syntax that non-specialists pick up quickly.
• Tight BrowserStack integration if you already use that cloud.

• Runs in the same event loop as your app, which historically meant no multi-tab, multi-origin or iframe-heavy testing without workarounds. Support has improved but the model still constrains you.
• JavaScript and TypeScript only.
• Meaningful parallelisation effectively requires paying for Cypress Cloud.

• Community is a fraction of Playwright's or Cypress's; fewer answers exist for edge cases.
• WebDriver-based, so it carries the usual latency and waiting caveats.
• Corporate stewardship by a device-cloud vendor is worth weighing if you plan to use a competitor.

Front-end teams who value developer experience and live in a single-origin JavaScript app.

Teams already on BrowserStack who want an integrated JavaScript framework.