Cypress vs Reflect

From $75 per month (Cloud Team, month-to-month; $799/year works out at $67)

Free tier available

You only pay for Cypress Cloud. Team is $75 month-to-month or $799/year; Business is $3,199/year. Costs scale with recorded test results, so a large suite on every PR is the expensive shape.

Now sold on a credit model — Premium 5,000 credits a month, Advanced 20,000, Enterprise 40,000, all with unlimited users — and SmartBear does not publish the prices, so you need a quote. Credits are consumed by test runs, so concurrency and suite size drive the bill.

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

14-day trial.

Category standard

Cypress.io · since 2017

Emerging

SmartBear (formerly Reflect Software) · since 2019

• 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.

• Nothing to install; a non-technical colleague can record a regression test in ten minutes.
• Handles file uploads, iframes and email verification, which trip up many no-code tools.
• Transparent published pricing, which is rare in this segment.

• 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.

• Cloud-only, so testing a private environment requires network work.
• Not suited to very large suites or heavy conditional logic.
• Small vendor — check longevity if this becomes critical infrastructure.

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

Startups that need ten critical journeys covered without owning a framework.