I just want to plug Playwright by Microsoft as I've been using it over the past month and have had a really great experience with it: https://playwright.dev
It's built by the founders of Puppeteer which came out of the Chrome team. Some things I like about it:
1. It's reliable and implements auto-waiting as described in the article. You can use modern async/await syntax and it ensures elements are a) attached to the DOM, visible, stable (not animating), can receive events, and are enabled: https://playwright.dev/docs/actionability
2. It's fast — It creates multiple processes and runs tests in parallel, unlike e.g. Cypress.
3. It's cross-browser — supports Chrome, Safari, and Firefox out-of-the-box.
4. The tracing tools are incredible, you can step through the entire test execution and get a live DOM that you can inspect with your browser's existing developer tools, see all console.logs, etc...
5. The developers and community are incredibly responsive. This is one of the biggest ones — issues are quickly responded to and addressed often by the founders, pull requests are welcomed and Slack is highly active and respectful.
My prior experience with end-to-end tests was that they were highly buggy and unreliable and so Playwright was a welcome surprise and inspired me to fully test all the variations of our checkout flow.
I did, but only very briefly. I originally wasn't looking for an E2E tool but was evaluating another tool for a different problem (Nx) which included Cypress as part of its opinionated defaults.
Cypress was a surprisingly nice experience as well and led me to research other modern e2e tools. Most of the points above can be compared against Cypress — Playwright supports parallel execution of tests within the same file on the same machine, which Cypress doesn't, and so is much faster. Cypress doesn't use modern async / await syntax. Due to its architecture, Playwright can test across tabs, work with iframes easily, which Cypress can't.
The UI for Cypress's developer tools is nice, but... as I said, Playwright's tracing UI is really excellent and the documentation is also really well done. This is also a personal thing, but I trust tools that came out of browser teams (Chrome) to emulate browsers in a more efficient way, e.g. spinning up cheap, isolated browser contexts in Chrome, the details of waiting for an element to be ready, etc...
It's built by the founders of Puppeteer which came out of the Chrome team. Some things I like about it:
1. It's reliable and implements auto-waiting as described in the article. You can use modern async/await syntax and it ensures elements are a) attached to the DOM, visible, stable (not animating), can receive events, and are enabled: https://playwright.dev/docs/actionability
2. It's fast — It creates multiple processes and runs tests in parallel, unlike e.g. Cypress.
3. It's cross-browser — supports Chrome, Safari, and Firefox out-of-the-box.
4. The tracing tools are incredible, you can step through the entire test execution and get a live DOM that you can inspect with your browser's existing developer tools, see all console.logs, etc...
5. The developers and community are incredibly responsive. This is one of the biggest ones — issues are quickly responded to and addressed often by the founders, pull requests are welcomed and Slack is highly active and respectful.
My prior experience with end-to-end tests was that they were highly buggy and unreliable and so Playwright was a welcome surprise and inspired me to fully test all the variations of our checkout flow.