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Cypress vs Selenium
Organizations that perform continuous testing make great strides in providing quality products and services and matching customers’ evolving demands. This, eventually, helps them move to a fully federated Center of Excellence (CoE).
According to a survey, the majority of companies are investing their time and budget in test automation. Below or some of the tests these companies are hoping to automate:
- 87% of the companies use the agile software development testing model.
- 82% of the companies use agile exploratory testing.
- 78% of the companies use automation for functional and regression testing.
The survey is meant to prove how effective software testing is for organizations that intend to raise their business and customer value.
Why is efficient software testing impossible without automation?
Software testing ensures that a particular software does what it is supposed to do without any bugs or compromised performance.
Automating your software testing is better to speed up your SDLC instead of relying on manual test work. Automated test results cut the cost of failures and promise a higher quality product is delivered to the market.
While manual testing is prone to human errors, automated software testing gives you accurate and reliable results at every execution. You save time by reporting the test results sooner (it hardly takes a few minutes) rather than waiting for hours or days for them to come up.
Automated tests are also the foundation for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. All your committed code is tested automatically, and results are shared with the developers. This way, they can prioritize the fixes and keep the development process running smoothly.
There are many test automation frameworks and test automation tools available in the market. Below are the main reasons for using automation testing:
- Receive test results much faster than with manual testing
- The biggest benefits are recognized on large repetitive tasks, such as regression testing
- Rapid releases are made possible without having to compromise the quality of the product
- Fewer issues will ever slip to your end-users, as automation is more reliable than human error-prone manual testing
While these automation tools bring clear benefits, there’s still a dilemma about which one to go for. Test automation frameworks come with their own best practices and, undoubtedly, are built to serve your best interest. Still, we want to make it easier for you so you don’t have to think twice before choosing the most reliable framework.
Cypress, Selenium, and testRigor are among the top test automation frameworks available for the highest quality assurance of your software.
Let’s look at each one of them in detail. We’ll discuss the programming languages they use, their functionality, test case speed execution, and finally, give you an overall verdict so you can make the best testing choice for your organization.
What is Cypress?
Cypress.io is a web-based testing automation framework with cross-browser functionality. It provides an open-source ecosystem that intends to help front-end developers build modern web applications faster and better without worrying about test automation management.
Cypress primarily focuses on integration testing and unit testing and runs in the same loop as your application to offer instant testing results for your code.
Moreover, to maintain a record of test failures and successes, it automatically takes screenshots of your web app. To install Cypress, you only need to run the command $npm, and you are all set.
Key Advantages of Cypress
Cypress uses JavaScript, the key language for website development, which makes it stand out from the rest of the automation frameworks. Due to this, it has some major advantages to its credit, as mentioned here:
- Cypress runs directly on the browser.
- You can debug your web apps quickly and efficiently. Its screenshot feature takes you straight to the error section, which makes fixing the defects smooth and simple.
- Thanks to its fast execution, you can have your test results in a fraction of the time with a response time of fewer than 20 minutes.
- You can set up Cypress tests more quickly than Selenium since dependencies and libraries are already defined, and there is no need for additional configuration.
- You can write different kinds of tests, such as functional, integration, and unit tests.
Key Disadvantages of Cypress
While Cypress is easy to set up and work with, it is limited in the testing approach that restricts companies to make it their preferred automation framework. Here are its main disadvantages:
- You can’t test iFrames with Cypress, which Selenium and testRigor do quite effectively.
- You can’t conduct data mining or web crawling, as it is not a generic browser automation tool.
- You can’t test multiple tabs or windows simultaneously.
- You can’t run cross domains testing, which makes it trickier to test certain elements of your website. For example, if your login provider or payment page is on a separate domain, it’s not possible to test two different domains simultaneously.
- Since Cypress is browser-based, you won’t be able to run end-to-end tests combining multiple platforms. This also means no API or mobile testing is possible with this framework.
What is Selenium?
Selenium is an open-source testing framework that is used to validate web applications across different browsers. Selenium includes two main products:
- Selenium WebDriver
- Selenium IDE
For a seamless testing process, Selenium supports a number of third-party drivers, bindings, and plugins. It’s not a complete testing framework on its own, but its portable features let you extend its benefits with third-party tools such as Apple SafariDriver, RSelenium, Capybara, and others.
Key Advantages of Selenium
Selenium has always been a popular test automation choice among tech professionals due to the following advantages:
- You can run its test automation tools remotely as well as on a web browser using its Chrome (including Electron), Firefox, Safari, and Edge add-on. The add-on records and plays back your interaction with the browser.
- You can use its Grid server to run test cases on a vast combination of browsers/OS such as Windows, Mac, Linux, and more.
- You can write test cases in all major languages like Python, JAVA, JavaScript, C#, and Ruby.
- You can run multiple test cases in parallel and save execution time.
Key Disadvantages of Selenium
While Selenium is still a very popular software testing framework, its lack of interoperability adds some serious disadvantages:
- Initial framework setup is very complex, and you need senior QA engineers to write tests the right way.
- Test stability is typically a big issue, and test maintenance becomes a full time job on bigger projects.
- You can’t test mobile and desktop applications.
- You can’t have fast test execution. You need to write instructions for every task, which increases the testing time and additional time goes in investigating the failures and then, resolving them.
- You can’t generate test reports automatically. Selenium doesn’t have an in-built reporting feature. Due to this, your final results may get lost unless you have integrated a trusted third-party solution.
What is testRigor?
testRigor is an AI-driven cloud-based testing system. It’s the only one in this comparison that seamlessly supports end-to-end testing and covers web, desktop, native and hybrid mobile applications, mobile browsers, desktop, and APIs. testRigor’s biggest differentiators are no-code tests written in plain English, excellent test stability, and extremely low test maintenance.
You can sign up with testRigor for free!
Key Advantages of testRigor
testRigor’s next-gen engine adds some unique advantages to its use:
- You can test and retest all the functionalities in less than 30 minutes with the parallelization feature.
- You can run your test cases written in plain English. Instead of writing test cases in a programming language, you only need to use English commands to test your application with testRigor.
- You can typically author your automated tests 15 times faster than with Selenium. Achieving desired test coverage has never been so easy!
- You will spend 99.5% less time on average towards test maintenance.
- Tests are extremely stable and reliable, which allows for a smooth integration into the CI/CD pipeline.
Key Disadvantages of testRigor
- No support for native desktop applications (same as with Selenium and Cypress). Update: testRigor now supports native desktop testing!
- testRigor is the only paid tool in this comparison. It’s not so straightforward, however. Many clients actually realize cost savings once they factor in higher QA engineer salaries, increased efficiency of test creation, and infrastructure costs. testRigor is no-code and cloud-based, and anyone on the team will be able to write automated tests.
Upgrade Your Test Automation with testRigor
Cypress, Selenium, and testRigor are used by global brands for functional testing and test automation in general. When it comes to executing tests, testRigor definitely has the upper hand. This is thanks to its rigorous AI usage and in-built advanced automation tools.
You don’t need to be well-acquainted with any of the programming languages or rely on third-party bindings. What’s more, tests are written from a human’s perspective, which means no Xpaths or CSS Selectors. This makes your development and testing processes way faster and more reliable.
Need a refresher? Here’s an at-a-glance review of Cypress vs Selenium vs testRigor:
| Selenium | Cypress | testRigor | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What is it? | Test automation framework | Test automation framework | Complete cloud-based system |
| Programming Language | Selenium uses WebDriver as an interface for writing test instruction sets, which you can run interchangeably in many browsers.
You must know at least one of these programming languages:
|
Its test runner uses JavaScript and no other language or browser driver bindings. Due to this, it handles JavaScript frameworks equally well such as React, Angular, Vue, and so on. | testRigor is no-code, where tests are written from a human’s perspective in plain English. AI-engine allows for flexible syntax, and you can always define new commands if desired (Ex: “tap” vs “click”) |
| Test Automation Frameworks | Selenium is majorly used for automating web applications. To run test cases over them, it uses frameworks like WebDriverIO, Selenium Base, Helium, and so on.
Written in JavaScript, WebDriverIO is among the most popularly-used testing frameworks, like Mocha for Cypress. It uses WebDriver protocols and Appium automation technology to run tests both locally and in the cloud. |
Cypress is among the few all-in-one testing frameworks that work without Selenium as a base. You can make it work with frameworks like:
Selenium also works with assertion libraries such as:
If needed, it can be integrated with Selenium and its wrappers such as Selenium Webdriver. |
testRigor is an all-in-one system and shares no external dependencies with third-party tools.
Before launching into the market, its AI-driven framework was tested over millions of test scenarios to ensure its reliability over complex functionality and end-to-end workflows. It works seamlessly without any additional test automation frameworks and nearly obliterates test maintenance. |
| Test Execution Speed | Its use of XPath makes the testing results unreliable sometimes. The reason is that the XPath search pattern often changes between two different executions, and it navigates through the HTML DOM structure to locate the specific elements.
Depending on what element identifiers are used, it generates a different search path for every new execution. This results in a slow execution speed for Selenium test cases, as there’s often a chance of human error and test script inconsistency. |
Cypress’ parallel testing feature reduces the execution speed by 5x. It is built to ensure testing and development can happen simultaneously.
It stubs the browser or your applications to make them behave as per your test cases to provide you with real-time UI changes for UI testing. You can alter your application state directly via your test code to accelerate your software development life cycle. |
For execution, it uses the parallelization feature to run all the tests in under 15 minutes. Easily integrate your test suite into CI/CD pipeline and run your tests as frequently as needed. Not relying on implementation makes its tests ultra-stable. |
We want to see you and your organization stay on pace with the modern web standards. Request a demo now to upgrade your testing process, reduce defect escape rate due to higher test coverage, and build better values for your business and customers with testRigor!
