Cypress.io blocks certain plugins from version 13, pushing users to Alternative frameworks

Cypress.io has blocked specific plugins that enabled the use of alternative test dashboards such as Sorry Cypress and Currents. These services are in direct competition with their own Cypress Cloud offer.

This move has prompted a response from Currents, which has announced that it will suspend its integration with Cypress starting from version 13. Notably, Currents and DeploySentinel (another Cypress Cloud alternative) also supports Playwright, an alternative automation testing framework to Cypress, and the company has noted an increasing trend of users contemplating or making a switch to this framework.

There have been reports suggesting that Cypress is facing financial challenges after not managing to reach any significant revenue and having trouble converting free users to paid, mostly due to many of them being attracted to the open-source model but having no intentions of paying for services like Cypress Cloud. This is one of the biggest reasons alternatives like the aforementioned Sorry Cypress were born in the first place. This has caused the company to lose ground against the advancement of Playwright and its advantages, such as not having paywalls, being 100% free, and being supported by Selenium. All of this has led to interpreting the decision to block certain plugins as a desperate and last resort measure to combat these difficulties.