Why We Walked Away from Cypress - Maciej Wyrodek

Switching From Cypress to Playwright: A Real-World Guide to Test Automation Migration

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"There is no second testing environment such close to production like production itself." - Maciej Wyrodek

In this episode, I talk with Maciej Wyrodek about moving from Cypress to Playwright. We talked about why Cypress started to work against the team: opinionated style, plugin churn, iFrames, flaky screenshots, and a pricing wall around parallel runs. Maciej's answer was a hands on hackathon with devs and testers. Playwright won. The migration starts with their top 10 flows and production smoke checks.

Maciej Wyrodek is a knowledge seeker, Quality Consultant, Mentor and Trainer - specialised in process improvement, and Test automation. Maciej is always looking for a new opportunity to challenge and hone his skills. He has gathered experience working for different companies with different working models, From small to big corporations, From Product via In-house development to software house. Thanks to that he has a wide perspective on testing quality and delivering value. During his stay in Dublin he realised his passion: Knowledge sharing. His strong belief is that what makes us human is the ability to learn and share knowledge. That is why for the almost decade he has been doing his best to give back to the IT community, by writing articles, recording videos on his channel Itea Morning and speaking on conferences.

Highlights:

• Choosing the most popular framework for the wrong context creates compounding workarounds: Cypress was a poor fit for iFrame-heavy payment flows, full-page screenshot needs, and specific React scroll behavior.
• Vendor lock-in on parallelization killed the Cypress relationship: Cypress blocked third-party orchestration tools above version 13, leaving teams either paying multiples of their QA budget for Cypress Cloud or freezing on an outdated version.
• A one-day hands-on hackathon with real test scenarios on the actual product reveals tool fit faster and more reliably than any static feature comparison or vendor demo.
• AI-assisted migration from Cypress to Playwright shows early promise but requires careful prompting, feeding both repos and documentation to the agent, and the results still need human review for long-term maintainability.