Context
Recently, I was discussing career development with a QA mentee, and we faced an interesting question: What is the best automation framework to learn as a starting automation QA?
The question arose because her current project uses Cypress, and she has some experience with it from a course. However, she had never worked with Playwright, and we encountered a job requirement explicitly asking for Playwright experience.
Comparing Cypress and Playwright
We have been working on a Cypress-based project but found some of its design choices challenging. One major issue is Cypress’s approach to asynchronous operations, which relies on chainable commands. This can make code harder to read, especially when combining multiple actions. For example, extracting text from one field and comparing it with another requires deeply nested .then(...) callbacks, leading to unreadable code.
Industry Trends
When analyzing industry trends, Playwright’s adoption has been growing rapidly:
- NPM Trends: Playwright surpassed Cypress in downloads in May 2024. As of March 2025, Playwright has more than double the downloads of Cypress and has been on a strong growth trajectory since September 2023, while Cypress has stagnated.
- Google Trends: Playwright is gaining popularity, although the total search volume for Cypress remains about four times higher.
- Stack Overflow Trends: Playwright overtook Cypress in popularity around 2023, and as of now, it is nearly twice as popular.
Conclusion
While Cypress offers simplicity, its limitations in core design and performance hinder its growth. Playwright, on the other hand, benefits from Microsoft’s backing, supports multiple programming languages, and has a more robust architecture with an orchestrating server. Given these advantages, Playwright is likely to continue gaining traction and may eventually surpass Cypress in community adoption.