Playwright Passed Cypress in Weekly Downloads and the Gap Is Widening — Did Cypress Lose the Browser Testing War?

General
1

If you have been keeping an eye on npm download trends, the numbers tell a story that is hard to ignore. Playwright now averages 20–30 million weekly downloads, and the trajectory is sharply upward. Cypress, once the undisputed king of browser testing, is trending in the opposite direction. For the first time in the browser testing space, there is a clear winner emerging — and it is not the incumbent.

I have spent the last two years watching this shift unfold, and after migrating my own team’s test suite, I want to break down why Playwright is winning and whether Cypress can recover.

1. Speed — True Parallelism Changes Everything

Playwright runs tests roughly 4x faster than Cypress through genuine parallelism and multi-browser support in a single test run. Cypress executes tests sequentially inside a single browser instance by default. Playwright spins up isolated browser contexts in parallel, leveraging every core on your CI machine. When your test suite grows past a few hundred tests, this difference stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the determining factor in whether developers actually run tests before merging.

2. Simplicity — 1 Dependency vs. 160+

Run npm install playwright and you get a single dependency. Run npm install cypress and you pull in 160+ transitive dependencies, including a bundled Electron binary. The Cypress install downloads hundreds of megabytes. The Playwright install fetches browser binaries on demand and keeps the dependency tree clean. In a world where supply chain security matters, fewer dependencies means a smaller attack surface.

3. Browser Coverage — Safari Support Matters

Playwright supports Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit (Safari) natively. Cypress only recently added Firefox support and still does not support Safari. If you are building a consumer-facing product where a meaningful percentage of your users are on iPhones and Macs, not being able to test Safari is a genuine gap. Playwright’s WebKit engine is the same rendering engine Safari uses, so you get realistic Safari behavior without needing macOS hardware.

4. Architecture — Outside the Browser vs. Inside It

This is the most fundamental difference. Playwright operates outside the browser using the Chrome DevTools Protocol (and equivalent protocols for Firefox and WebKit). This gives it native access to network interception, multiple tabs, file downloads, iframes, web workers, and service workers. Cypress runs inside the browser, which creates architectural limitations that are extremely difficult to work around — no multi-tab support, limited iframe handling, and constrained network stubbing.

Our Migration: 400+ Tests in 6 Weeks

My team migrated 400+ Cypress tests to Playwright over six weeks. The results were immediate:

  • CI pipeline time dropped from 22 minutes to 8 minutes. That is a 63% reduction.
  • Flaky test rate dropped from 12% to under 2%. Playwright’s auto-waiting mechanism is more reliable than Cypress’s retry-ability. It waits for elements to be actionable (visible, stable, enabled) before interacting, which eliminates most timing-related flakiness.
  • The migration itself was straightforward. Playwright’s API is intuitive, and the codegen tool auto-generates tests by recording browser interactions. We used codegen to bootstrap the trickiest flows and then refactored by hand.

Credit Where It Is Due — What Cypress Got Right

I do not want to pile on Cypress without acknowledging what it accomplished. Before Cypress, end-to-end testing meant Selenium — and Selenium was hell. Flaky, slow, painful to configure, impossible to debug. Cypress’s time-travel debugger and interactive test runner were genuinely revolutionary. Cypress democratized browser testing and convinced an entire generation of frontend developers that E2E tests were worth writing.

The Critical Business Mistake

But Cypress made a fatal strategic error: locking parallelization behind a $30K/year paid cloud tier (Cypress Cloud). Teams that needed parallel CI runs — which is virtually every team with a non-trivial test suite — were forced to choose between paying $30K or building hacky workarounds with cypress-parallel and custom sharding scripts. Playwright offers parallelism for free, built into the test runner. For budget-conscious teams, the migration decision was a financial no-brainer.

The Component Testing Angle

Cypress invested heavily in component testing as a differentiator. But Playwright now has experimental component testing support, and more importantly, Vitest and Testing Library have eaten into this space from below. Most teams I talk to use Vitest for unit/component tests and Playwright for E2E — they do not need Cypress for either layer anymore.

The Question

Has your team migrated from Cypress to Playwright, or do you still see reasons to stick with Cypress? I am particularly curious about teams that tried to migrate and went back — what were the deal-breakers?

2

We migrated our design system’s visual regression tests from Cypress + Percy to Playwright’s built-in screenshot comparison about four months ago, and the cost savings alone justified the entire effort. We were paying $500/month for Percy on top of the Cypress Cloud subscription. That is $6,000 a year just for visual regression testing on a single project.

Playwright’s toHaveScreenshot() is shockingly good. The pixel-diff threshold configuration gives us exactly the control we need — we set a maxDiffPixelRatio of 0.01 for layout tests and a tighter 0.005 for typography-critical components. We run visual comparisons across Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit in a single CI job, and the baseline management is straightforward: screenshots are committed to the repo, and diffs show up in PRs as image changes. No third-party dashboard required.

The cross-browser visual testing is where Playwright really shines for design systems. We caught a flexbox rendering inconsistency in WebKit that had been silently affecting Safari users for months — Cypress literally could not have caught it because it does not support WebKit. That one bug fix paid for the migration effort in user experience alone.

The one area where I genuinely miss Cypress: the interactive test runner was incredible for debugging. Being able to hover over each test step and see the DOM snapshot at that exact moment was magic. Playwright’s trace viewer is powerful — arguably more powerful — but it has a steeper learning curve. You have to record a trace, open it in the viewer, and navigate a timeline. It is more like Chrome DevTools than Cypress’s intuitive step-through.

For our design team members who occasionally write tests for new components, Cypress was more approachable. The command-chaining API (cy.get().click().should()) reads almost like English. Playwright’s API is clean but feels more “engineery” — it assumes you are comfortable with async/await and page object patterns. We ended up writing a thin wrapper library with helper functions like clickButton(name) and expectVisible(selector) to lower the barrier for designers contributing tests.

That said, I would not go back. The speed, the browser coverage, and the elimination of Percy from our stack make Playwright the clear winner for design system testing.

3

The $30K/year Cypress Cloud pricing was the tipping point for us too, and I suspect it was the tipping point for hundreds of engineering organizations that will never write a blog post about it.

We had three product teams, each with their own test suites, each needing parallel CI runs to keep merge queues moving. Cypress Cloud priced per-organization but with seat-based tiers that effectively tripled our cost. The total Cypress bill would have been roughly $90K/year — for test parallelization. Not for infrastructure, not for compute, not for developer tooling broadly. Just for the privilege of running browser tests in parallel.

For that money, we hired a contractor to spend four weeks migrating everything to Playwright. The contractor cost us about $20K. ROI was achieved in the first quarter, and every quarter after that is pure savings.

But I want to zoom out from the cost discussion because I think there is a bigger lesson here for developer tool companies.

Do not lock core developer workflow features behind enterprise pricing.

Parallelization is not a premium feature. It is a necessity. Every team with more than 50 E2E tests needs parallel execution to keep CI times under 10 minutes. When you paywall a necessity, you do not create a sustainable revenue stream — you create an incentive structure for your users to find alternatives. You are essentially funding your own disruption.

Cypress is not the first company to make this mistake. Docker Desktop’s licensing changes drove adoption of Podman and Rancher Desktop. HashiCorp’s BSL license change drove adoption of OpenTofu. There is a pattern: open-source tool gains dominant market share, company locks key feature behind paywall, community migrates to alternative that offers the feature for free.

The irony is that Cypress Cloud actually has useful features beyond parallelization — the analytics dashboard, flaky test detection, and test replay are genuinely valuable. If they had kept parallelization free and charged for the analytics layer, they might have retained their user base while still building a business. Instead, they gated the one feature that every team needs, and Playwright walked through the door they opened.

From an engineering management perspective, the migration also reduced our operational complexity. One fewer vendor to manage, one fewer SaaS bill to approve, one fewer SSO integration to maintain. Sometimes the best tool is the one that does not require a procurement process.

4

For mobile web testing specifically, Playwright is significantly ahead, and the gap keeps widening.

Our team builds a progressive web app that serves users across a wide range of devices. We test across 8 device profiles — desktop (1440px and 1920px), tablet (iPad portrait and landscape), and 6 phone sizes covering iPhone SE through iPhone 15 Pro Max and several Android viewport sizes. Playwright handles all of them in parallel within a single test file using test.describe blocks with different use configurations.

The device emulation is more accurate than what Cypress offers. Playwright’s device descriptors include not just viewport dimensions but also deviceScaleFactor, isMobile, hasTouch, and userAgent — so the browser actually behaves as if it is a mobile device. Touch event handling, hover behavior (or lack thereof on mobile), and viewport meta tag behavior all work correctly. With Cypress, we had to use cy.viewport() workarounds that only changed the window size without adjusting any of the mobile-specific behaviors. Buttons that worked in Cypress’s “mobile” viewport would fail on actual phones because the touch event handling was different.

Network throttling simulation is another area where Playwright excels. We test critical user journeys under simulated 3G conditions using the CDP session to throttle bandwidth and add latency. This catches performance regressions that only manifest on slow connections — like a 2MB hero image that loads fine on broadband but causes a 15-second blank screen on mobile data. Cypress has no built-in network throttling; you need plugins and workarounds that are fragile.

The responsive layout testing workflow is cleaner in Playwright as well. We have a single test file that runs the same user journey across all 8 device profiles, and the test report shows results grouped by device. When a layout breaks on one viewport but not others, we see it immediately. With Cypress, we had separate spec files for desktop and mobile, which inevitably got out of sync.

That said, I want to be clear: neither tool is great for actual native mobile testing. For our React Native app, we still use Detox. For iOS-specific features, we use XCUITest. Playwright’s device emulation is excellent for mobile web but it is not a substitute for testing on real devices or native app testing frameworks. The rendering engine is still desktop WebKit or Chromium running in a constrained viewport — it will not catch issues related to native scrolling momentum, system-level gestures, or platform-specific keyboard behavior.

But for mobile web — which is the majority of what most teams need to test — Playwright is the clear choice, and it is not particularly close.