CYPRESS IO OR SELENIUM WEBDRIVER?
Which Tool Should You Choose for Test Automation?
I want to share my experience working with tools for test automation. For a long time, Selenium WebDriver—commonly known as Selenium—was the go-to solution. Selenium gained popularity because it supports multiple programming languages, making it a great choice for many teams. Whether your team uses Java, C#, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, or others, Selenium has you covered.
My personal experience with Selenium involved building a test automation framework using C#. The result was excellent—I had full control over the framework because I used a strong object-oriented programming approach. This allowed me to follow patterns like TRIMS, which helped create smaller, more maintainable, and reliable test cases.
Was it hard to build? That depends on your programming skills. Having strong coding skills in the language you choose is crucial; otherwise, you risk ending up with an unmaintainable framework in the future. Over time, you might also need to use APIs to generate test data, which helps reduce manual test data maintenance.
In short, to build a high-quality automation framework with Selenium, you need to be a developer who prioritizes quality—not just a tester with some programming knowledge.
But What About Cypress.io?
Cypress was released in 2014 and has been gaining popularity ever since. But why? The answer is simple: you don’t need to be a developer—just a tester with programming skills.
Cypress uses JavaScript, which is easy to learn. It’s also a ready-to-use software (still actively maintained and developed when this article posted), so you just download it and start using it.
Besides that, Cypress has excellent documentation that covers almost everything you need to know to start automating your tests. There’s also a vibrant community that develops various modules to make automation even easier.
So, no need to be an expert developer—just follow the documentation and some tutorials, and you’re good to go.
From my experience, Cypress is easy to build, maintain, and execute tests with. Since I enjoy object-oriented programming, I appreciate that Cypress allows you to create your own JavaScript modules and reuse them across different tests.
I also prefer building data-driven automation, and Cypress supports that without any issues.
So What Do I Prefer: Cypress.io or Selenium WebDriver?
Actually, it doesn’t matter much since they both do the same job: automate my tests.