A Comparative Evaluation of End-to-End Testing Frameworks for Cross-Browser Web Applications : Cypress vs Playwright

Sammanfattning

In modern web applications, testing plays a vital role in ensuring that all componentsfunction as intended. Web application testing comprises various layers, and this studyspecifically focuses on front-end testing, commonly referred to as End-to-End (E2E) testing.E2E testing evaluates the complete functionality of a website from the perspective of userinteraction, ensuring that visual and functional consistency is maintained across differentweb browsers. This work presents a comparative evaluation of two widely used front-endtesting frameworks: Playwright and Cypress. The study assesses their performance usingkey quantitative metrics, including average execution time, standard deviation, coefficientof variation, and the 95 percentile. The tests were conducted across multiple browsersand screen resolutions, utilizing a real-world web applications and executed on two sepa-rate machines to ensure variability in test environments. The results show that Playwrightexhibits superior performance when leveraging multiple CPU cores, highlighting its scala-bility. Conversely, Cypress demonstrated better performance in single-core configurations,making it a strong candidate in environments with limited computing resources.