Cypress vs Selenium

Cypress is a front-end testing tool for web applications, combining an open-source Cypress App with the cloud-based Cypress Cloud service. The App supports end-to-end and component testing, launching and controlling real browsers from Chrome-family browsers and Firefox; WebKit is experimental. For debugging, it offers time-travel snapshots, readable errors, stack traces, automatic waiting, and network stubbing. Cypress Cloud stores recorded CI test runs and adds debugging, analytics, and orchestration for teams. It connects with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Jira, and its MCP works with AI coding assistants including Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. The Starter plan costs nothing and includes 10 users, 500 test results per month, 100 prompt executions per month, and 30-day access to paid features. Team costs $67 a month, billed annually at $799. Cypress says Cloud test content is stored in the United States, and material in public projects is publicly accessible. It also says its AI models are not trained on customer data.

Selenium is a free suite of tools for automating web browsers, primarily to test web applications. WebDriver provides language bindings for controlling browsers locally or remotely, and is a W3C Recommendation. The main project supports.NET/C#, Ruby, Java, Python, and JavaScript. Selenium IDE is a browser add-on for recording and replaying interactions in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. For distributed tests, Selenium Grid spreads work across machines and combinations of browsers and operating systems. Grid offers Standalone, Hub and Node, and Distributed configurations; Docker and Kubernetes deployment resources are also linked. Selenium Manager can discover, download, and cache browser releases and drivers. Documentation covers browser-specific functionality for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, and names GitHub Actions and Jenkins as CI/CD examples. Selenium began in 2004 at ThoughtWorks in Chicago. Grid has no authentication by default, and the project advises restricting external access and placing it behind a secure network. The latest Opera driver functionality is not supported, and that driver is officially unsupported. Selenium costs nothing.