Cypress panic (if there even is one)

Last week a reddit post was making rounds on the internet claiming that Cypress.io is dying and you should migrate your projects. I believe this post got way more attention than it deserved. In fact, I believe it deserved no attention whatsoever because by amplifying it, the lies that it contained spread far and wide. And as all lies do, it left people confused and uncertain. I got people reach out to me asking me whether they should migrate their tests and asked about the future of Cypress. Since it’s already out there and getting attention, I guess there’s no way for me to avoid talking about it. I wrote this post so I don’t have to respond to everyone individually.

Cypress updates

We received the last major update of Cypress back in December 2022, which created a feeling that after a strong year, Cypress development has stalled. Most of the feature updates done since v12 were improvements on Component testing and features interconnecting Cypress App with the Cypress Cloud service.

By looking at these updates a clue is given to what the company is now focused on. Growing the dev community around browser-based component testing and catering to enterprise customers by making improvements to the Cypress Cloud (dashboard) service. Funnily enough, I’ve been talking about how I wanted to see more improvements in Cypress Cloud earlier this year. I guess Cypress watches my YouTube channel 😂

Jokes aside, it really seems that Cypress is working on making their customers happy and creating a sustainable business. From what I can tell, they are being successful and the company itself is doing fine. Cypress v13 is just around the corner with some kick-ass debugging capabilities. On the community side, Cypress has announced CypressConf, where people all around the world will share their ideas and knowledge around Cypress (CFP is here)

Internet drama

Jordan Powell from Cypress tweeted this on the day this Cypress panic (if there even is one) started:

I have to agree with him on this one. Everything that has been said on that day was based on assumptions, mostly by people that have not been talking to the Cypress team nor had insight into the company during last couple of years. Let alone their financial state.

Many people have used this as validation of their concerns or an additional argument to their critique of Cypress as a tool. Even though the original critique is about the company, not the tool itself. But nuances have a hard time surviving online. Suddenly, opinions shifted into statements, statements turned into facts, facts turned into “the truth”. Lo and behold, the power of social media. That’s what happens when trolls get amplified.

Cypress and its future

I am still confident about Cypress, both the company and the open source software. I don’t think they are perfect, and would really like to see some improvements being made in both Cypress App and Cypress Cloud. I do think Cypress has a very fierce competition in e2e testing with Playwright. I think it would be quite interesting to merge these tools together. If that does not come into fruition, Cypress will still be a really cool solution for component testing.

So what should you do? Migrate all your tests? Please don’t do that. Not based on a reddit post. At least not based on that one.