JavaScript Web Test Automation Framework Rankings in JavaScript Rising Stars 2024

Cypress has fallen quickly within JS web test automation community, according to JavaScript Rising Stars.

My article, “JavaScript Web Test Automation Framework Rankings in JavaScript Rising Stars”, published a year ago, was a well-received one. Below is the ranking of the JS testing framework in 2023.

Please note, the scope of this article is within JavaScript Testing community.
There is not assessment on automation frameworks here, either, purely based on a ranking collected by a website (with some reputation).

Today, a thought came to me, as now is 2025, what’s the updated ranking (for 2024)?

Where is Cypress? (#3 in 2022, #5 in 2023). Need to scroll down, it is #9 in 2024.

The dropping rate is faster! Please consider the following facts:

• Cypress has been well-known for years

• There is a company, cypress.io, at one stage with 100+ staff, behind solely promoting the testing tool.

• Cypress.io received over US$60 million in funding (no more after 2020).

• Cypress marketing is doing very well, via its so-called ‘Cypress Ambassador’ program

• The target: web test automation barely changed. Selenium WebDriver has been proven successful. Cypress marketed itself as the "Selenium Killer," but it failed to live up to that claim. Three separate surveys in 2024 voted Selenium WebDriver as the best web automation framework.

A large percentage of JS ‘QA engineers’ I met have fallen into the hype of Cypress. Many years ago, after giving it a try, I quickly concluded: “It is bad, actually, worse, a joke”. After I started blogging on Medium, I published an article titled “Why Cypress Sucks for Real Test Automation” in January 2021 (the Cypress peak hype time). My article Cypress.io is Dying (August 2023) led to a few personal attacks from “passionate Cypress supporters”.

By the way, those so-called “Cypress supporters”, such as “Cypress Ambassadors”, most of them have no intention to do real automated testing.

• It Seems Most "Cypress Ambassadors" Don"t Love Cypress as They Claimed

• The “#1 Cypress Ambassador” Is Now Open to Finding Playwright Jobs

The nature of Cypress is just fit for them to fake a few years, that’s all.

Too Many Failed JavaScript Test Automation Frameworks!

Some might say “Zhimin, you may be a bit harsh on these Cypress Ambassadors”. I fully understand some people fake at jobs to make a living, that’s fine. But here, we are talking about real E2E QA automation, privately. How about showing some testing spirit (one key characteristic: objective): Web test automation barely changed over the past 20 years, i.e., a real test automation engineer has no excuses to fail. Have you witnessed a Cypress test automation success like the showcase below (using raw Selenium WebDriver + RSpec):

See my definition of E2E test automation success. Here’s the short version if you don’t want to read further: If the team heavily relies on manual testing, the QA engineers (not QA testers) there have failed.

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Related readings:

• My ebooks:
  - Practical Web Test Automation with Selenium WebDriver
  - Practical Continuous Testing: make Agile/DevOps real
  - My Selenium WebDriver Recipes in five languages.

• Team Considerations in Choosing Automated Test Scripting Language, Why Ruby is much better than JavaScript?

• E2E Test Automation Anti-Pattern: Developer-Focused Approach. Part 2: Scripting Language, Frameworks and Tools

• Annotations on the article "Why We Switched from Cypress to Playwright"