Skip to content
testcritic

Playwright vs Cypress vs Selenium WebDriver

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

PlaywrightE2E & UI Testing
CypressE2E & UI Testing
Selenium WebDriverE2E & UI Testing

Entry price

Free and open source

Open source

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

Free tier

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Free and open source. Microsoft also sells a hosted parallel-runner service; the library itself has no paid tier.

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.

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

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

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

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

Apache-2.0

MIT (runner)

Apache-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

TypeScriptJavaScriptPythonJavaC#
JavaScriptTypeScript
JavaPythonC#JavaScriptRubyKotlinTypeScript

Platforms

WebAPI
WebAPI
Web

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Category standard

Microsoft · since 2020

Category standard

Cypress.io · since 2017

Category standard

Software Freedom Conservancy · since 2004

Strengths

  • Auto-waiting and web-first assertions remove most of the sleep() flake that plagues older tools.
  • The trace viewer — DOM snapshots, network, console and screenshots per step — is the best failure triage in the category.
  • True WebKit support, so Safari bugs are caught on Linux CI without a Mac.
  • 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 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.

Limitations

  • No native mobile app support. Mobile means an emulated viewport, not a real device.
  • The API surface is large; teams without a conventions document end up with four ways to write the same locator.
  • Component testing is still experimental compared to the E2E runner.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Best for

Teams that write their own tests and want the lowest-flake open-source option available.

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

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

Full review
Full review
Full review

All of these integrate with: Jenkins.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.