Why Playwright Replaced Cypress on Every New Project I Start

Cypress deserves real credit — it made end-to-end testing approachable for teams that had never written a browser test before. But on every greenfield project for the last two years, Playwright has been the default, for reasons that show up the moment a suite grows past a handful of specs.

• True cross-browser support, including WebKit, without a separate paid tier.
• Native parallelization that doesn't require a third-party dashboard to actually save wall-clock time.
• Auto-waiting and locator strategy that eliminates most of the flaky-test babysitting Cypress suites accumulate.
• First-class support for testing multiple tabs, iframes, and background contexts — real requirements in modern apps.

The migration cost for an existing Cypress suite isn't trivial, so I don't recommend ripping one out mid-project. But for anything new, Playwright's CI story alone — sharded runs finishing in a fraction of the time — pays for the learning curve within the first month.

A test suite that takes 25 minutes to run in CI doesn't get run before merging. It gets run after the incident.