As automated testing becomes increasingly important in software development, the need for efficient and reliable testing frameworks is more critical than ever. Among the popular testing frameworks, Cypress, TestCafe, and Playwright are leading the pack with their robust features and ease of use. In this blog post, we will examine which framework is faster between Cypress, TestCafe, and Playwright.
Cypress is a JavaScript-based end-to-end testing framework that allows developers to write tests in a simple and readable syntax. It’s known for its real-time reloading feature, which means that any changes made in the test code are immediately reflected in the browser. Additionally, Cypress comes with built-in assertions and a powerful GUI debugger, making it easy to identify and fix issues in tests.
Playwright is an end-to-end testing framework developed by Microsoft that provides developers with a simple and powerful API for writing tests. It supports multiple programming languages (JavaScript, Python, Java, C#) and allows developers to write tests in a variety of different syntaxes. Playwright also comes with built-in support for multiple browsers and devices, making it easy to test applications across different platforms.
TestCafe is another JavaScript-based end-to-end testing framework that provides developers with an easy-to-use syntax for writing tests. It also comes with a wide range of built-in assertions and a powerful CLI for running tests. TestCafe is unique in that it runs tests on multiple browsers and devices.
Let's get it started with the experiment 🙂
QA-Practice app testing playground will be used as target for our tests
Prerequisites (applied to each framework)
- QA-Practice app running on local environment (localhost:9020), to avoid external factors (connectivity lag, etc.)
- Google Chrome browser. Headless mode enabled.
- Parallelism disabled. All the frameworks use a single worker.
- Video recordings for test results disabled.
- 4 test files. 6 test scenarios, identically implemented on each framework
- 5 test executions performed for each framework
Test Execution Time
Test Overview
Conclusion: The winner is... Playwright!
Based on this experiment, it looks like:
– Playwright is 2.5 times faster than Cypress
– Playwright is 3.4 times faster than TestCafe
However, all three frameworks are excellent choices and provide fast and reliable test automation capabilities.
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The TestCafe team is actively working on test execution speed and recently introduced ‘Native Automation’ mode.
Please try it and share your results here.
Hi Mikhail, thanks for these insights! I’ve just retried the test execution on TestCafe and:
– classical normal execution took about 24seconds (more than the results at the time I wrote the article)
– the native automation execution took about 18seconds
For this new test I used the initial version of testcafe that I used in the article (v2.5.0 which supports native-automation) and also the latest testcafe npm version (2.5.1-rc.1). For both versions I got the same execution results shared in this comment.
As conclusion, the article results remain valid as testcafe is #3 in term of test execution speed.
Kind regards,
RV
The speed and easy of use of Playwright is great