You will be asked to choose a tool, or to defend the one you have. The junior answer is to list features of the tool you know best. The senior answer starts with the constraints.
Let me be direct about where Cypress is a strong choice, and where it is not. Being able to say the second part is what makes people trust the first.
Cypress is a good fit when:
- Your team writes JavaScript and will maintain the tests themselves.
- You want an excellent debugging experience. The command log with time travel is still the best thing about Cypress, and it makes juniors productive quickly.
- Your app is a normal web app in one tab.
Cypress is the wrong tool when:
- You need real multi-tab or multi-origin flows. Cypress has improved here, but if your core flow bounces between three domains and two tabs, Playwright will fight you less.
- You need Safari. Cypress does not support WebKit properly. If your users are mostly on iPhones, that matters.
- You need many parallel machines cheaply. Parallelisation is easier and free in Playwright. In Cypress the good version is a paid product.
- Your team is not JavaScript. If everyone writes Java or Python, Selenium or Playwright in their language will be maintained better than a JavaScript suite nobody is comfortable in.
Notice that none of those are about which tool is "better". They are about fit.
Now the harder question you will actually face: should we migrate?
Usually the answer is no, and here is the honest reason. A migration costs months, and at the end you have exactly the same coverage you started with. That is a lot of work to show a manager zero new value.
Migration makes sense when the current tool blocks something you truly need, like Safari coverage, or when the suite is so broken that you are rewriting the tests anyway. In that second case, migrating while you rewrite is nearly free.
If you do migrate, do it gradually. Run both suites for a while. Move the most valuable tests first. Never stop the old suite until the new one covers the same ground, because "we will finish it next quarter" is how teams end up with two half-suites and no confidence.
Remember this: choose for your constraints, not your preferences, and be able to say where your favourite tool loses.
No problem for this lecture. Tool choice is a discussion, not an exercise.