Many QA teams choose Cypress.io for creating automated software tests because it executes tests directly inside the browser (which solves some of the most frustrating timing issues that are common with Selenium). However, many teams end up looking for Cypress alternatives because it still has a few major downsides: In this post, we’ll discuss these downsides in more detail and show how our tool—Rainforest QA—solves these issues.

Functional testing is one of the final steps before a software application goes live, and it’s designed to ensure critical user paths are operating correctly. It’s a kind of black box testing that doesn’t evaluate the underlying code of the application, but instead tests whether a specific input leads to an expected output in the user interface (UI).

Selenium is the oldest and most well-recognized automated testing tool for web apps, so a lot of software teams try it out when they first experiment with automated testing. But most teams quickly run into three Selenium disadvantages: Because of these challenges, many software companies that use Selenium find testing to be a huge drain on time, effort, and resources. That’s why we designed Rainforest QA—to solve the limitations of Selenium and make QA easy to scale and maintain.