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Cypress.io vs Intern comparison of testing frameworks
What are the differences between Cypress.io and Intern?

Cypress.io

https://www.cypress.io/

Intern

https://github.com/theintern/intern
Programming language

JavaScript

JavaScript

Category

End-to-End Testing, Intergration Testing, Unit Testing

Unit Testing, Functional Testing

General info

Cypress users are typically developers or QA engineers building web applications using modern JavaScript frameworks. This is the top tier UI automation framework which outsmarts Selenium based frameworks in most of the aspects!

Cypress enables you to write all types of tests: 1. End-to-end tests; 2. Integration tests; 3. Unit tests; 4. Cypress can test anything that runs in a browser; Apart from that Cypress provides the Dashboard facility for CI/CD

Intern is minimal test system for JavaScript designed to write and run consistent.

Intern is a complete test system for JavaScript designed to help you write and run consistent, high-quality test cases for your JavaScript libraries and applications. Using Intern we can write tests in JavaScript and TypeScript using any style like TDD, and BDD. Intern can run unit tests in most browsers that support ECMAScript
xUnit
Set of frameworks originating from SUnit (Smalltalk's testing framework). They share similar structure and functionality.

No

No

Client-side
Allows testing code execution on the client, such as a web browser

Yes

This is the primary goal of Cypress, it tests anything that runs in a browser and works to build great user experience that is it tests the applications flow from beginning to end from a user's perspective. It is built to handle modern JavaScript frameworks especially well and also works equally well on older server rendered pages or applications

Yes

Intern is a complete test system for JavaScript It Runs in the browser and can test any front-end component and functionality
Server-side
Allows testing the bahovior of a server-side code

Yes

Although Cypress is not a general automation framework, nor is it a unit testing framework for your back-end services, It can test back-end behaviours for example using cy.task() command which provides a way for running Node code, so you can take actions necessary for your tests outside of the scope of Cypress

Yes

Since it is a complete testing system that can test any type of JavaScript code, it can test server-side behaviour and components as well
Fixtures
Allows defining a fixed, specific states of data (fixtures) that are test-local. This ensures specific environment for a single test

Yes

Cypress has inbuilt fixtures capabilities or example using the command 'cy.fixture(filePath)' loads a fixed set of data located in a file

N/A

Group fixtures
Allows defining a fixed, specific states of data for a group of tests (group-fixtures). This ensures specific environment for a given group of tests.

Yes

Cypress can create group fixtures using the 'cy.fixture' command

N/A

Generators
Supports data generators for tests. Data generators generate input data for test. The test is then run for each input data produced in this way.

N/A

Licence
Licence type governing the use and redistribution of the software

MIT License

FreeBSD License

Mocks
Mocks are objects that simulate the behavior of real objects. Using mocks allows testing some part of the code in isolation (with other parts mocked when needed)

Yes

Cypress comes built in with the ability to stub and spy with cy.stub(), cy.spy(), It also automatically bundles 'sinon', 'lolex' and 'sinon-chai' which all work to give Cypress mocking capabilities

Intern uses the Dojo Toolkit’s AMD loader. To mock, you should be able to just use the standard AMD 'map' feature, else you can use third party libraries like sinon.js
Grouping
Allows organizing tests in groups

Yes

Cypress allows you to configure tests into groups however there is no way currently to run the groups

Yes

You can group tests into Suites which may be specified as file paths or using glob expressions, there is typically one top-level suite per module.
Other
Other useful information about the testing framework