Cypress vs Puppeteer

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

Widely used

Google · since 2017

• 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.

• Small, fast, and very well documented for Chrome-specific work.
• First-class access to the Chrome DevTools protocol for performance tracing and coverage.
• Excellent at non-test jobs: PDF rendering, screenshots, scraping.

• 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.

• No test runner, assertions, retries or reporting — you assemble all of it.
• Chrome and Firefox only; no WebKit.
• For E2E testing specifically, Playwright is a strict superset. Choose Puppeteer only when you want a minimal automation library.

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

Automation jobs that are not tests, or Chrome-only tooling where you want minimal dependencies.