Cypress adoption guide: Overview, examples, and alternatives

Cypress is a prominent tool for testing web applications, emphasizing a smooth developer experience and reliable, flake-resistant tests, particularly excelling in end-to-end and component testing. Unlike other tools like Selenium, Cypress operates directly in real browsers and within the same execution loop as the application, enhancing test reliability and debuggability. It features a Node server process for real-time communication and is divided into the Cypress application for local test development and optional Cypress Cloud for managing test runs. Cypress is praised for its ease of use, shallow learning curve, extensive documentation, and integration with major CI/CD systems, although it is limited to JavaScript, does not support multiple tabs or browsers, and lacks some features like native or mobile event testing. Despite these limitations, Cypress remains a powerful tool with features like time travel, automatic waiting, and detailed error messages, making it one of the leading choices for web application testing.