Playwright

Playwright is a modern end-to-end testing framework developed by Microsoft, offering cross-browser support across Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit, with built-in TypeScript integration.

Compared to Cypress, Playwright addresses several limitations we have encountered over the years. Parallel test execution is possible without any paid plan. Cross-origin testing is supported natively. The built-in Trace Viewer makes debugging tests failing in the CI significantly easier—it records a full timeline of each test run, including network requests, console logs, and DOM snapshots, which can be inspected afterward. This is huge improvement compared to Cypress, where we could only have a screenshot and a video recording of the failing test, which often wasn't enough to understand the root cause of the failure.

From a developer experience perspective, Playwright feels more natural to work with than Cypress. Cypress uses a custom command-chaining API that resembles promises but does not actually behave like native JavaScript promises. Mixing it with standard async/await code can lead to bugs and is often confusing for developers who are used to how asynchronous JS works. Playwright, on the other hand, uses standard async/await, so the code behaves exactly as any JavaScript developer would expect.

A practical use case we have been working with is E2E testing eCommerce projects on Shopware 6. Shopware provides an official Acceptance Test Suite (ATS) built on top of Playwright. ATS replaces the old Cypress-based suite that is no longer maintained and comes with a rich set of built-in features: ready-to-use data fixtures, a Test Data Service for creating Shopware entities such as products, customers, and orders, Page Objects covering both the Storefront and the Administration, and the Actor pattern for writing readable test scenarios. For a hands-on introduction to ATS see our blog post on how to automate Shopware E2E tests with Playwright and ATS.

We are currently assessing Playwright as a successor to Cypress in our E2E testing toolkit.