Cypress

This is a great question!

Cypress is an overall testing solution of which e2e is a subset of its capabilities. The Cypress App is free to use and completely open source it was built with a developer experience first focus and it was geared toward solving the problem of web application testing by running in the browser's process.

I often encounter in my work with organizations adopting new tools a framing of why should I choose X tool over Y tool. This is a great place to start thinking, but what I like to challenge organizations I work with is to take one step back and ask, " Am I looking for a tool or a solution?"

A tool works in conjunction with other tools to achieve some mostly singular purpose; unit testing, API testing, integration testing, component testing, e2e testing, contract testing, analytics, etc. Tools also require learning a new syntax, continual training, implementation time, on-going maintenance and more a conjunction of other tools to accomplish an overall solution, in this case effectively and confidently testing.

Cypress is an overall testing solution of which there are two core product areas (right now), The Cypress App & Dashboard. The Cypress App is a completely free open source project that can test anything that runs in the browser.

Features of Cypress App - absolutely free - #1 tool recommended by Angular and Protractor team for migrating to after the deprecation of Protractor - automatic retries and baked in tests for actionability on elements - running in the browser's process - can test the following; front end unit, component, integration, api, e2e testing - can test multi-origin (currently in beta) - amazing docs - syntax is straight forward - no complex configs or setup - thriving and vibrant community - bi-weekly release cycle, so always iterating and improving - integrates with the Dashboard to show information from your runs in the cloud

The Cypress Dashboard is a paid subscription service that well to put it briefly makes testing even better with a focus on;

• speeding up your runs through parallelization
• unlocking an enhanced debugging workflow
• providing you analytics that help you better understand the ongoing health of your test suite
• handling all of your Cypress testing types in one place
• addressing flake through our flake analysis and mitigation workflows
• integrates all CI providers, Slack, Jira, and the top source control management tools to report directly on your runs
• and a lot more

I hope this was helpful for you and the team, but don't take my word for it come engage in our community forums on Discord and ask around.

https://discord.gg/RFyjB34h

Oh, and I almost forgot, our DX team built a free to use Protractor to Cypress migration tool that will help you swap your tests over to Cypress. It's a really great tool when you're getting started to learn more about Cypress syntax. Anything with a lot of complex logic may not migrate appropriately, but it should give you a running start!

https://migrator.cypress.io/

Cypress tests are always fast in execution as compared to tools that use selenium. Cypress also operates at the network layer so you don't need to install any external libraries. Cypress tests are easy to set up and you don't need any browser drivers to run cypress tests. Any browser that is installed, you can run cypress tests on those browsers. It is very easy to write locators and tests in cypress as compared to any other tool. The only drawback of cypress is it doesn't handle subdomain change and multiple tabs. But there are workaround for subdomain change that one can use

I work with two angular applications, one of them i already created a framework based on protractor. The other one i think using cypress instead of the protractor, the reason for that is the protrator will be deprecated at the end of the year. That reason for me is enough to select cypress as the better approach once it has a huge and increasing community and its downsides have been solved with time.

For end-2-end tests it's great - fast, working with or without headed mode, can do dom snapshots instead of only screenshots.

Hello João Pires,

From my experience using API and Framework tests tools like Selenium Webdriver, CodeCeptJS, and Cypress I never ever see a unique test repository that can work over Web system and Native Mobile app. Many times, it is tried to use the same test suite to two kinds of app, a web, and native mobile app, and then the test flow is mapped using different selectors to both apps and conditional code are add growing the complexity of tests. Definitely, it is not a good practice.

I see great potential in using Cypress to modern web apps running on browsers to desktop or mobile. However, how your second point is to run on mobile browsers like Safari and Chrome may be a good approach will be using a service of Cross Browser as BrowserStack or SourceLabs.

It is important to have clear if is relevant run while tests to many browsers in the same platform. If the goal is to guarantee the e2e flow from an integrated environment, use the most popular browser to users can be enough. (ps: 80% of users use Chromer and just only 30% of users use Safari.)

From a Mobile perspective, I believe that today there are more efficient test approaches to guarantee the behaviors of the components of isolated way than using some technology base on Selenium. As per example an instrumentation-based API using Espresso. Just only using Appium for E2E critical scenarios.

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

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