“Cypress.io is Dying” Revisited, One Year Later

More signs over the last year indicating that my prediction is correct.

One year ago (2023–08–01), I published “Cypress.io is Dying” on Medium and “A Follow-up” three months later.

Disclaimer: The growth of Playwright over Cypress has nothing to do with my article. To begin with, I have little involvement with any of those two; I’m simply sharing my opinions, drawing from 18+ years hands-on experience on E2E test automation, with my readers, who are limited to Medium members and Substack paid subscribers.

I like to use facts to support my statement. “Cypress.io is Dying” has only about 20K reads (~2K member reads, accessing the full content), which is tiny. In other words, my influence is negligible.

Some readers might say, “Zhimin, Cypress.io hasn’t gone bankrupt yet”. True, but “dying” can be a prolonged process. We’ve all known someone who has been “dying” for years.

In this article, I will recap the events related to Cypress over the past year. Like the original article, I will present the facts, you make your own judgement.

1. The Playwright download count exceeded Cypress

After I published the article “Cypress.io is Dying”, an IT tech influencer wrote a counter-article on Medium and commented on my post, citing NPM Trends data showing that Cypress had 5 million weekly downloads — significantly more than Playwright.

However, he overlooked one crucial point: I was making a prediction. In my follow-up article, I used NPM download data to illustrate the trend (as shown in the below chart on the left) and replied a link to his comment. Surprisingly, this individual immediately blocked me, seemed fear that I would respond to his article. Beware of such people, using other popular articles to gain traffic — they fear the facts and the truth.

The reality is that the Playwright-taking-over-Cypress rate is bigger than I predicted.

The actual numbers show a huge difference in terms of growth rates.

2023–08–06: 5087262 (Cypress), 1420334 (Playwright)
2023–11–05: 5292985 (Cypress), 2725611 (Playwright)
2024–08–04: 5090135 (Cypress), 6259226 (Playwright)

Over the past year, the download count of Playwright, relative to Cypress, grew from 28% to 123%!

Please note that the numbers above are based solely on NPM stats and do not include Playwright usage in other languages. If I did, the gap would be even larger.

2. No News on Cypress’ Press & Media for about a year

There have been no new entries on Cypress.io’s Press & Media page since September last year.