Detox vs Espresso

Free and open source

Free and open source

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Wix · since 2017

Category standard

Google · since 2013

• Automatic synchronisation with the RN bridge eliminates most timing flake.
• Same JavaScript and Jest tooling the app team already uses.
• Fast execution because there is no external driver round trip.

• Automatic UI-thread synchronisation makes tests both fast and reliable.
• First-party Google support, updated alongside Android itself.
• Runs on emulators in CI cheaply, including Firebase Test Lab.

• React Native only — useless for native or Flutter apps.
• Requires building a special test binary, which complicates the pipeline.
• Grey-box coupling means an RN upgrade can break your test setup.

• Android only.
• Testing across app boundaries requires UiAutomator alongside it.
• Compose testing uses a related but separate API to learn.

React Native teams that want low-flake E2E tests in their existing toolchain.

Android teams that want the fastest, most reliable native UI tests.