TestCafe vs WebdriverIO

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

Established

DevExpress · since 2016

Widely used

OpenJS Foundation · since 2015

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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