Tool brief · open-source
Cypress: lab brief
Cypress is a focused browser test runner that pairs an open-source CLI with the Cypress Cloud dashboard. Its sweet spot is React-SPA shops that want a friendly authoring experience.
Direct answer
Our take: 2026 adoption is flat at around 14 percent of the JS testing market while Playwright has surged. Cypress is not wrong, but it is now a clear second pick on greenfield JS unless its trade-offs are deliberately wanted.
Composite
72 / 100
Maintainability (80) is strong; mobile (35) is poor by design.
Pricing
Public
Cloud Starter from $75/mo (10k results)
Cloud Starter is around $75 per month for 10k test results; Team is around $300/mo for 100k results.
Model
open source
Open-source CLI free; Cypress Cloud per-result tiers
Six axes
Per-axis measurement
Parallelism70
Self-heal55
Mobile35
API coverage75
Language breadth50
Maintainability80
When to pick
Pick Cypress when
- Greenfield SPA where developer ergonomics dominate
- Small teams that value the time-travel UI
- Teams already invested in the Cypress Cloud ecosystem
When NOT to use this tool
- Cross-origin navigation in a single test
- Multiple browser tabs in one test
- Native file pickers and dialogs
- Mobile native testing
Recent changes
What changed
Adoption flat at ~14% in 2026 surveys; 6.5M weekly npm downloads; Cypress Cloud Team tier listed around $300/mo on the published structure.
Where to go next