Features
- Time travel debugging with DOM snapshots
- Real-time reloads during test development
- Network stubbing and interception
- Cypress Cloud for CI test analytics
Pros
- Excellent developer experience with interactive runner
- Time travel debugging makes failures easy to diagnose
- Strong community and extensive documentation
Cons
- Only supports Chromium-based browsers and Firefox (no Safari)
- Runs in-browser, limiting multi-tab and multi-origin testing
- Cypress Cloud pricing can be expensive for teams
Overview
Cypress is a JavaScript end-to-end testing framework known for its outstanding developer experience. It runs tests directly inside the browser, providing real-time feedback with an interactive test runner that shows your application alongside the test commands being executed.
Cypress’s signature feature is time travel debugging. Every command during a test run captures a DOM snapshot, allowing you to hover over commands and see exactly what the application looked like at each step. This makes debugging test failures significantly easier than traditional E2E frameworks.
Cypress also provides powerful network interception capabilities, allowing you to stub API responses for deterministic testing without needing a running backend.
When to Use
Choose Cypress when developer experience is your top priority and you don’t need Safari (WebKit) testing. It is ideal for teams that want an approachable E2E testing tool with excellent debugging capabilities. For cross-browser testing including Safari, consider Playwright instead.
Getting Started
npm install --save-dev cypress
npx cypress open