Compare brief · Legacy modernisation decision
Cypress vs Selenium
Cypress vs Selenium is the legacy-modernisation decision for teams that are not (yet) ready to move all the way to Playwright.
Direct answer
open-source
Cypress
composite: 72 · pricing: public
Price card re-read 22 Sep 2026. The published tiers are Starter (free, 500 test results/month, 10 users), Team, Business and Enterprise. There is no paid Starter tier. Team is $67/month billed annually at $799/year, or $75/month month-to-month, and includes 120k test results/year. Business is $267/month billed annually at $3,199/year, or $300/month month-to-month, with the same 120k/year allowance. Enterprise is quote-only and includes 1.8M test results/year. Adoption remains flat at around 14% in 2026 surveys on 6.5M weekly npm downloads.
Open the Cypress brief →open-source
Selenium
composite: 64 · pricing: public
Selenium 4.x stable; Selenium Manager handles driver provisioning automatically; adoption share continues to slip vs Playwright in 2026 dev surveys.
Open the Selenium brief →Pick A when
Pick Cypress when
Small SPA-first team that values author ergonomics over architectural breadth.
Pick B when
Pick Selenium when
Polyglot estate that needs WebDriver-protocol guarantees.
Cost
How the cost picture differs
Cypress carries a Cloud subscription if you want hosted runs; Selenium is free at licence but heavier on engineer time.
Open the 3-year TCO calculator →Caveats
Things this compare cannot answer
- Neither is the right answer for native desktop or many enterprise packaged apps.
- If your only reason to pick Cypress over Selenium is friendlier authoring, consider Playwright first.