Why Cypress Sucks for Real Test Automation? (Part 2: Limitations)

Many limitations of Cypress make it not suitable for serious test automation

Update: A related article “Why JavaScript Is Not a Suitable Language for Real Web Test Automation?” is now available. (2021–04–15)

Update: A related article “Cypress vs Selenium WebDriver Comparison by Example” is now available (2022–06–22)

I have received some positive feedback on my “Why Cypress Sucks for Real Test Automation” (Part 1) article. A few readers wanted to clarify it a bit more. Yes, the article was more focused on why there is really no need to use Cypress, as there is a much better tool (in almost every way) Selenium WebDriver. In this follow-up article, I will focus on the limitations of Cypress.

Table of Contents:
  ∘ 1. Technical limitations of Cypress
  ∘ 2. Cypress is actually slower
  ∘ 3. Cypress tests are hard to maintain
  ∘ 4. Cypress can only use Node.JS, which is not suitable for test automation
  ∘ 5. Cypress wrongly added “retry-ability”, which shall be a CT feature
  ∘ 6. Complex and Inconsistent Syntax
  ∘ 7. Not Future-Proof

1. Technical limitations of Cypress

For the specific technical limitations of Cypress, please read this article, “My Thoughts on Cypress.io” by Alister Scott on 2019–07–16. I will just highlight the comments section here:

“There are technical limitations to the way Cypress loads and runs the tests, which are covered in https://www.cypress.io/how-it-works Some of the limitations will be removed (iframes, shadow DOM support) as we continue, and some limits will probably be there for many years.”
- Gleb Bahmutov, distinguished engineer at cypress

and the reply from Alister Scott:

I did hear this line “if it’s on the web, Cypress can test it” which I still have a problem with as my recent apps I have worked on have both used iFrames can Cypress can’t test them — including WordPress.com which is a super high volume web application.
- Alister Scott, Excellence Wrangler at Automattic (WordPress)

Gleb and Alister exchanged their opinion professionally here. Alister had problems testing…