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Cypress vs Jest vs Mocha: What are the differences?

Introduction

Cypress, Jest, and Mocha are popular testing frameworks used in web development. While they all serve the same purpose of facilitating testing, there are key differences between them that make each framework unique. In this Markdown code, we will explore these differences and provide a concise comparison between Cypress, Jest, and Mocha.

  1. Ease of Setup: Cypress, as an end-to-end testing framework, provides an all-in-one setup experience. It includes built-in dependencies and an intuitive user interface, making it easy to start testing without much configuration. On the other hand, both Jest and Mocha require additional setup, including the installation of test runners, assertion libraries, and other necessary packages.

  2. Testing Approach: Cypress focuses on end-to-end testing and provides a comprehensive testing environment for simulating user interactions and testing the entire application stack. It uses a real browser environment, allowing developers to perform actions as if they were a user. In contrast, Jest and Mocha are primarily used for unit testing and focus on isolating and testing individual units of code, such as functions or components.

  3. Syntax and Framework Support: Cypress uses a JavaScript-based syntax with a fluent and easy-to-understand API. It provides direct support for modern frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular, making it seamless to test applications built with these frameworks. Jest, on the other hand, has a similar JavaScript syntax but also supports TypeScript out of the box. While Mocha supports both JavaScript and TypeScript, it does not have built-in support for any specific framework.

  4. Mocking and Spies: Cypress, being an end-to-end testing framework, does not have built-in support for mocking and spying functionalities. Instead, it encourages the use of network stubbing and fixtures to simulate server responses. In contrast, Jest and Mocha provide comprehensive mocking and spying functionalities, allowing developers to easily mock dependencies and track function invocations.

  5. Code Coverage: Jest is known for its excellent code coverage capabilities. It provides detailed reports indicating which parts of the codebase are covered by tests and which are not. This feature helps identify areas of the code that require additional testing. While Cypress can generate code coverage reports, it is not as detailed as Jest. Mocha, on the other hand, does not have built-in code coverage capabilities and requires the integration of additional tools like Istanbul to generate coverage reports.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Cypress has gained popularity for its extensive documentation, active community support, and growing ecosystem of plugins and custom commands. It has strong backing from the Cypress team and regular updates and enhancements. Jest also has a large and active community, with numerous plugins and integrations available. Mocha has been around for quite some time and has a mature community and ecosystem, although it may not have the same level of growth and updates as Cypress and Jest.

In summary, Cypress offers an easy setup and end-to-end testing capabilities while providing excellent support for modern frameworks. Jest is well-known for its code coverage capabilities and extensive community support, while Mocha has a mature community and is great for unit testing but lacks some of the features offered by Cypress and Jest.

Advice on Cypress, Jest, and Mocha
Yildiz Dila
testmanager/automation tester at medicalservice · | 5 upvotes · 258.7K views
Needs advice
on
CypressCypress
and
ProtractorProtractor

In the company I will be building test automation framework and my new company develops apps mainly using AngularJS/TypeScript. I was planning to build Protractor-Jasmine framework but a friend of mine told me about Cypress and heard that its users are very satisfied with it. I am trying to understand the capabilities of Cypress and as the final goal to differentiate these two tools. Can anyone advice me on this in a nutshell pls...

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Replies (2)
Kevin Emery
QE Systems Engineer at Discovery, Inc. · | 4 upvotes · 158K views
Recommends
on
CypressCypressProtractorProtractor

I've used both Protractor and Cypress extensively. Cypress is the easier and more reliable tool, whereas Protractor is the more powerful tool. Your choice of tool should depend on your specific testing needs. Here are some advantages and disadvantages of each tool:

Cypress advantages:

  • Faster

  • More reliable (tends to throw fewer intermittent false failures)

  • Easier to read code (handles promises gracefully)

Cypress disadvantages:

  • Cannot switch between browser tabs

  • Cannot switch to iFrames

  • Cannot specify clicks or keypresses explicitly as if a real user was interacting

  • Cannot move the mouse to specific co-ordinates

  • Sometimes has trouble switching between different top-level domains, so not good for testing external links

  • Cypress is a newer tool with less extensive documentation and less community support

Protractor advantages:

  • More powerful because it is Selenium-based - it can switch between tabs, it can handle external links to other domains, it can handle iFrames, simulate keypresses and clicks, and move the mouse to specific co-ordinates within the browser.

  • More extensive community support and documentation

Protractor disadvantages:

  • Slower and more brittle - in general there is a higher likelihood of cryptic and/or intermittent errors which may cause your tests to fail even though there is nothing wrong with your application

  • For highly experienced automation engineers, the fundamental "brittle" nature of Selenium can be worked around - it can be reliable but only if you really know what you are doing

  • Less graceful handling of promises - relies on async/await or .then to manage the order of execution. Therefore it is a bit harder to read the code.

  • Harder to set up, and the method of setup impacts its reliability. For example, a hub/node configuration where the selenium jar is on a different physical machine than the browser under test will cause unreliability in your tests. Not everyone knows about this type of thing, so it's common to find Selenium frameworks that are set up poorly.

It's probably better to use Cypress if

  • you're at a smaller company and have a close relationship with developers who can help write hooks or stubs in their code to assist your testing

  • you don't need to do things like switch between tabs or test links to external top-level domains

It's probably better to use Protractor if

  • You might need to switch between tabs or test external links to other domains within the scope of your framework

  • You want to use a more accurate simulation of how a real user interacts with a browser (i.e. click at this location, type these keys)

  • You're at a company where you won't have any support from developers in writing hooks or stubs to make their code more testable in a less powerful framework like Cypress

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Jian Wang
Web Engineer at sentaca · | 1 upvotes · 186.9K views
Recommends

Please try Handow, the e2e tool basing on Puppeteer.

Gherkin syntax compatible

Chrome/Chromium orentied, driven by Puppeteer engine

Complete JavaScript programming

Create test suites rapidly without coding (or a little bit), basing on built-in steps library

Schedule test with plans and arrange stories with sequential stages

Fast running, execute story groups in parallel by multi-workers

Built-in single page report render

Cover page view, REST API and cookies test

https://github.com/newlifewj/handow

http://demo.shm.handow.org/reports

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Decisions about Cypress, Jest, and Mocha
Shared insights
on
CypressCypressJestJest

As we all know testing is an important part of any application. To assist with our testing we are going to use both Cypress and Jest. We feel these tools complement each other and will help us get good coverage of our code. We will use Cypress for our end to end testing as we've found it quite user friendly. Jest will be used for our unit tests because we've seen how many larger companies use it with great success.

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Postman will be used to do integration testing with the backend API we create. It offers a clean interface to create many requests, and you can even organize these requests into collections. It helps to test the backend API first to make sure it's working before using it in the front-end. Jest can also be used for testing and is already embedded into React. Not only does it offer unit testing support in javascript, it can also do snapshot testing for the front-end to make sure components are rendering correctly. Enzyme is complementary to Jest and offers more functions such as shallow rendering. UnitTest will be used for Python testing as it is simple, has a lot of functionality and already built in with python. Sentry will be used for keeping track of errors as it is also easily integratable with Heroku because they offer it as an add-on. LogDNA will be used for tracking logs which are not errors and is also a Heroku add-on. Its good to have a separate service to record logs, monitor, track and even fix errors in real-time so our application can run more smoothly.

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We use Mocha for our FDA verification testing. It's integrated into Meteor, our upstream web application framework. We like how battle tested it is, its' syntax, its' options of reporters, and countless other features. Most everybody can agree on mocha, and that gets us half-way through our FDA verification and validation (V&V) testing strategy.

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Pros of Cypress
Pros of Jest
Pros of Mocha
  • 29
    Open source
  • 22
    Great documentation
  • 20
    Simple usage
  • 18
    Fast
  • 10
    Cross Browser testing
  • 9
    Easy us with CI
  • 5
    Npm install cypress only
  • 1
    Good for beginner automation engineers
  • 36
    Open source
  • 32
    Mock by default makes testing much simpler
  • 23
    Testing React Native Apps
  • 20
    Parallel test running
  • 16
    Fast
  • 13
    Bundled with JSDOM to enable DOM testing
  • 8
    Mock by default screws up your classes, breaking tests
  • 7
    Out of the box code coverage
  • 7
    Promise support
  • 6
    One stop shop for unit testing
  • 3
    Great documentation
  • 2
    Assert Library Included
  • 1
    Built in watch option with interactive filtering menu
  • 1
    Preset support
  • 0
    Can be used for BDD
  • 0
    Karma
  • 137
    Open source
  • 102
    Simple
  • 81
    Promise support
  • 48
    Flexible
  • 29
    Easy to add support for Generators
  • 12
    For browser and server testing
  • 7
    Curstom assertion libraries
  • 5
    Works with Karma
  • 3
    No other better tools
  • 1
    Simple setup
  • 1
    Works with saucelabs
  • 1
    Lots of tutorials and help online
  • 1
    Default reporter is nice, clean, and itemized
  • 1
    Works with BrowserStack
  • 1
    Simple integration testing

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Cons of Cypress
Cons of Jest
Cons of Mocha
  • 21
    Cypress is weak at cross-browser testing
  • 14
    Switch tabs : Cypress can'nt support
  • 12
    No iFrame support
  • 9
    No page object support
  • 9
    No multiple domain support
  • 8
    No file upload support
  • 8
    No support for multiple tab control
  • 8
    No xPath support
  • 7
    No support for Safari
  • 7
    Cypress doesn't support native app
  • 7
    Re-run failed tests retries not supported yet
  • 7
    No support for multiple browser control
  • 5
    $20/user/thread for reports
  • 4
    Adobe
  • 4
    Using a non-standard automation protocol
  • 4
    Not freeware
  • 3
    No 'WD wire protocol' support
  • 4
    Documentation
  • 4
    Ambiguous configuration
  • 3
    Difficult
  • 2
    Many bugs still not fixed months/years after reporting
  • 2
    Multiple error messages for same error
  • 2
    Difficult to run single test/describe/file
  • 2
    Ambiguous
  • 2
    Bugged
  • 1
    BeforeAll timing out makes all passing tests fail
  • 1
    Slow
  • 1
    Reporter is too general
  • 1
    Unstable
  • 1
    Bad docs
  • 1
    Still does't support .mjs files natively
  • 1
    Can't fail beforeAll to abort tests
  • 0
    Interaction with watch mode on terminal
  • 3
    Cannot test a promisified functions without assertion
  • 2
    No assertion count in results
  • 1
    Not as many reporter options as Jest

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What is Cypress?

Cypress is a front end automated testing application created for the modern web. Cypress is built on a new architecture and runs in the same run-loop as the application being tested. As a result Cypress provides better, faster, and more reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser. Cypress works on any front-end framework or website.

What is Jest?

Jest provides you with multiple layers on top of Jasmine.

What is Mocha?

Mocha is a feature-rich JavaScript test framework running on node.js and the browser, making asynchronous testing simple and fun. Mocha tests run serially, allowing for flexible and accurate reporting, while mapping uncaught exceptions to the correct test cases.

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What are some alternatives to Cypress, Jest, and Mocha?
Selenium
Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) also be automated as well.
TestCafe
It is a pure node.js end-to-end solution for testing web apps. It takes care of all the stages: starting browsers, running tests, gathering test results and generating reports.
Puppeteer
Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome over the DevTools Protocol. It can also be configured to use full (non-headless) Chrome.
WebdriverIO
WebdriverIO lets you control a browser or a mobile application with just a few lines of code. Your test code will look simple, concise and easy to read.
Protractor
Protractor is an end-to-end test framework for Angular and AngularJS applications. Protractor runs tests against your application running in a real browser, interacting with it as a user would.
See all alternatives