Cypress vs WebdriverIO

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

OpenJS Foundation · since 2015

• 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.

• One API for web and native mobile, which is rare and genuinely useful if you ship both.
• Vendor-neutral: swap between local, grid and any device cloud by changing config.
• Mature plugin ecosystem for reporting, visual testing and accessibility.

• 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.

• Configuration-heavy compared to Playwright; the wdio.conf.js file becomes a project of its own.
• Inherits WebDriver's flakiness characteristics when used in WebDriver mode.
• Smaller community than Playwright or Cypress, so obscure problems take longer to solve.

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

JavaScript teams that need one framework covering both web and native mobile.