Ecosystem and Adoption

How widely adopted and actively developed each end-to-end testing tool is as of 2026.

Playwright

The clear market leader as of 2026, with roughly 45% adoption versus Cypress’s 14% and about 33 million weekly npm downloads versus Cypress’s 6.5 million — a gap that’s widened sharply since 2021, alongside higher developer satisfaction scores (91% vs. 72% in the State of JS 2025 survey).

Cypress

Still widely used and well-regarded, particularly for teams already invested in its ecosystem, but has lost significant relative ground to Playwright in both raw adoption and year-over-year growth.

Selenium

Far from “dead” despite years of predictions otherwise — still under active development in 2026, having shipped multiple releases adding WebDriver BiDi support and deprecating its older CDP-based DevTools API, and remains the broadest multi-language option available.

Puppeteer

Mature and still maintained by the Chrome team, but increasingly overshadowed by Playwright (built by former Puppeteer authors) for teams that want the same low-level control with better cross-browser support.

WebdriverIO

Actively developed under OpenJS Foundation (Linux Foundation) governance, recently adding a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server so AI agents can drive browsers and mobile apps through it directly.

TestCafe

Development has slowed noticeably since original maintainer DevExpress stepped back, and the project is now largely community-maintained — still active (with releases shipping into 2026) but with less momentum than the tools above.