Selenium WebDriver vs Cypress

Free and open source

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

Free and open source. The real cost is grid infrastructure or a device-cloud subscription.

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

Everything, self-hosted

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

Category standard

Software Freedom Conservancy · since 2004

Category standard

Cypress.io · since 2017

• The widest language and browser support of anything in the category, including legacy browser versions.
• A W3C standard, so it will outlive any single vendor. Skills transfer between employers.
• Every device cloud speaks Selenium, which keeps you portable between vendors.

• 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.

• No built-in waiting strategy, reporting, parallelism or assertions — expect to assemble and maintain a framework around it.
• Explicit waits are your problem, and getting them wrong is the number one source of flake in real Selenium suites.
• Out-of-process communication makes it slower than Playwright or Cypress.

• 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.

Enterprises with polyglot teams, legacy browser requirements, or an existing grid investment.

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