Cypress vs Jest: What are the differences?
What is Cypress? Better, faster, and more reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser. Cypress is a front end automated testing application created for the modern web. Cypress is built on a new architecture and runs in the same run-loop as the application being tested. As a result Cypress provides better, faster, and more reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser. Cypress works on any front-end framework or website.
What is Jest? Painless JavaScript Unit Testing. Jest provides you with multiple layers on top of Jasmine.
Cypress and Jest belong to "Javascript Testing Framework" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Cypress are:
- Time Travel
- Debuggability
- Automatic Waiting
On the other hand, Jest provides the following key features:
- Familiar Approach: Built on top of the Jasmine test framework, using familiar expect(value).toBe(other) assertions
- Mock by Default: Automatically mocks CommonJS modules returned by require(), making most existing code testable
- Short Feedback Loop: DOM APIs are mocked and tests run in parallel via a small node.js command line utility
"Open source" is the primary reason why developers consider Cypress over the competitors, whereas "Open source" was stated as the key factor in picking Jest.
Jest is an open source tool with 26.4K GitHub stars and 3.57K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Jest's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Jest has a broader approval, being mentioned in 271 company stacks & 161 developers stacks; compared to Cypress, which is listed in 59 company stacks and 44 developer stacks.
As we all know testing is an important part of any application. To assist with our testing we are going to use both Cypress and Jest. We feel these tools complement each other and will help us get good coverage of our code. We will use Cypress for our end to end testing as we've found it quite user friendly. Jest will be used for our unit tests because we've seen how many larger companies use it with great success.
Postman will be used to do integration testing with the backend API we create. It offers a clean interface to create many requests, and you can even organize these requests into collections. It helps to test the backend API first to make sure it's working before using it in the front-end. Jest can also be used for testing and is already embedded into React. Not only does it offer unit testing support in javascript, it can also do snapshot testing for the front-end to make sure components are rendering correctly. Enzyme is complementary to Jest and offers more functions such as shallow rendering. UnitTest will be used for Python testing as it is simple, has a lot of functionality and already built in with python. Sentry will be used for keeping track of errors as it is also easily integratable with Heroku because they offer it as an add-on. LogDNA will be used for tracking logs which are not errors and is also a Heroku add-on. Its good to have a separate service to record logs, monitor, track and even fix errors in real-time so our application can run more smoothly.
Pros of Jest
- Fast14