TestCafe vs Cypress

Free and open source

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

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

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.

Established

DevExpress · since 2016

Category standard

Cypress.io · since 2017

• Zero setup: no drivers, no browser downloads, works on any installed browser including mobile Safari on a real phone.
• Automatic waiting and stable selectors with very little configuration.
• Genuinely simple concurrency flag for parallel runs.

• 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.

• The proxy architecture occasionally breaks on apps with strict CSP, service workers or unusual auth flows.
• Smaller community and slower ecosystem growth than Playwright or Cypress.
• No component testing story.

• 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.

Small teams who want a working cross-browser suite with the least possible setup.

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