Learning Resources

If you are new to automated testing, below are some great learning resources. Start by watching some videos to get a general idea of how the tools work. But first....

Which Testing Tool Should I Use?

You are going to be living with this tool for a long time so take the time to understand the differences between the tools. For a bottom line assessment, generally we would say Cypress blazed the trail and fixed many of the problems legacy tools have—but Playwright currently has a better product.

Cypress introduced a concise programming style, a great UI, excellent documentation and vastly shortened the time it takes to debug tests. It also has a very strong community with lots of examples and training courses. On the other hand, the concise programming style can make more complex tests tougher to write and debug. It's also not possible to control multiple browsers or tabs easily (though there are ways around it; see the documentation).

Playwright was released more recently than Cypress, bringing a few more features and maintaining a more traditional programming style. In particular, Playwright makes debugging complex tests easier, tests can be made in multiple languages, controlling multiple tabs and browsers is easy, it's possible to run tests directly from within Visual Studio Code, support is much faster on their issue queue—and it runs significantly faster than Cypress (between 3x and 5x faster). Expect Playwright to continue to grow quickly in market share.

To get a sense of what it's like working in both tools, check out the resources below. NOTE: Some resources below highlight the lack of a GUI debugging tool in Playwright. That was true at the time the videos were made. However, Playwright now has a GUI tool and both tools are advancing quickly.

Check out the video I made that hits the main points:
Should I Choose Cypress or Playwright?

However, you should definitely watch some videos from the section below as well. After all, you may not agree with my assessment.