Currents Blog

Playwright

Playwright Flaky Tests: Detect Them in CI with Retries

Find Playwright flaky tests in CI from retries, JSON reports and shard results, then rank them by flake rate, confirm with repeatEach and quarantine.

Playwright

Claude Code Playwright MCP: Fix Tests That Fail in CI

Use Claude Code and Playwright MCP to reproduce a test that fails in CI, fix the root cause instead of adding waits, and prove it with --repeat-each.

Playwright

Playwright Trace Viewer: Debug CI Failures Step by Step

Use the Playwright trace viewer to debug red CI jobs: keep the failing attempt's trace, then find locator, backend and flaky-test root causes.

Playwright

Playwright Video Recording in CI: Modes, Cost and Fixes

Playwright video recording in CI: pick a mode that fits your retries, measure what video costs, upload videos per shard and fix missing or empty ones.

Playwright

AI Playwright Tests: MCP, CLI, Agents and Prompts Compared

Compare Playwright MCP, the CLI, test agents and a prompt-only assistant on your own suite, then score and gate the AI Playwright tests they write.

Playwright

Playwright 1.64: Shuffle, Test Locks and Breaking Changes

Playwright 1.64 in CI: run --shuffle nightly and keep the seed, keep shared-account tests apart with locks, and catch the breaking changes.

Playwright

GitHub Actions Cost: How to Cut Playwright CI Minutes Without Losing Coverage

Cut GitHub Actions costs for Playwright without losing coverage. Cache browser binaries, scope triggers, set job timeouts, shard correctly, track flaky tests, and tighten artifact retention.

Playwright

Reviewing AI-Generated Playwright Tests Before They Reach CI

A seven-check review checklist for AI-generated Playwright tests, covering hallucinated assertions, intent-weakening heals, and UI-driven state setup before they reach CI.

What does "skipped" mean - test statuses review across popular JavaScript runners

JavaScript test runners share status words and disagree about what the words mean. Playwright and Cypress use "skipped" for opposite cases. Jest carries 7 statuses but not "flaky". This guide translates each runner's vocabulary and shows how runners derive flakiness from attempts.

Product Updates

Introducing Currents' New Pricing

Cheaper rates, bigger volume discounts, a new self-serve Business plan, and fairer overage. Here's what changed and why.

Playwright

Playwright API Testing: Patterns That Actually Scale

Playwright API tests that pass locally still fail in CI? Here's the fixture architecture, per-worker isolation, and observability practices that fix that.

Playwright

Playwright Component Testing in Large Frontend Codebases

Not every component needs a real browser. Here's a clear decision framework for when Playwright component testing adds value and when Jest already covers it.

Playwright

Playwright Custom Reporters: Build Your Own

A Playwright custom reporter takes 20 minutes to prototype and months to maintain. Here's what it actually takes to build one that holds up in production CI.

Playwright

Playwright's New --last-failed-file Flag: Re-Run Only Failed Tests in GitHub Actions

Playwright v1.61 adds --last-failed-file, a flag that makes caching --last-failed in CI simpler and more reliable. Learn how to set it up in sharded GitHub Actions workflows.

Playwright

Playwright + Feature Flags: Advanced Test Isolation Strategies

Feature flags break Playwright's isolation model because they live outside the browser context. Learn how to intercept flag evaluation at the network layer, declare flag state as a fixture, and structure parallel runs so no worker can affect another's flag context.

Playwright

Playwright CI at Scale: What Works in GitHub and GitLab

Your Playwright pipeline is only as fast as its slowest shard. Learn what GitHub Actions and GitLab CI get right at scale, and the one thing neither solves.

Playwright

How Playwright Tests Leak Data (and How to Stop It)

Playwright test data leaks rarely come from bad secrets hygiene, they come from test artifacts, fixtures, and reporters. Here's how to find and close that gap.

Playwright

Playwright Anti-Patterns: What to Watch For

Most Playwright anti patterns don't show up until your suite scales. Here's how to spot and fix them before CI becomes unpredictable.

Playwright

Playwright testing in Staging vs Production

A decision framework for splitting your Playwright tests between staging and production — what belongs where, how to configure each, and when production testing isn't worth it.

Product Updates

Playwright 1.60.0 Release Updates

Version 1.60.0 of Playwright has been released on May 11, 2026 and introduced a few compatibility issues with Currents. In order to use newer versions of Playwright (>= 1.60.x) update to the new v2 of the Currents Playwright reporter (`npm install @currents/playwright@latest`).

Playwright

Designing Playwright Tests That Survive UI Refactors

Your UI refactor didn't break the app, it broke your tests. Learn how semantic Playwright test design decouples your suite from implementation details for good.

Playwright

Playwright HTML Reporter: Why It Breaks Down at Scale

When Playwright suites grow, pass/fail reports stop being enough. Learn what teams need instead for flakiness detection, worker visibility, and trend analysis.

Playwright

Testing Authentication with Playwright: The Complete Guide

Learn how to handle secrets, OAuth, MFA, magic links, and parallel CI without flaky runs.

Playwright

What Breaks When Your Test Suite Grows From 20 to 500 Tests

Learn what breaks when a Playwright suite scales from 20 to 500 tests, and how to fix it with test data isolation, flakiness math, smarter retries, and faster CI pipelines.

Playwright

The Playwright Network Mocking Playbook

Playwright mocking is easy to start but hard to scale. Follow this practical guide to learn when to mock, when it becomes risky, and how to reduce mock debt.

Product Updates

Fixing Playwright Tests with AI: What Prompts Need to Actually Work

AI prompts can fix some Playwright test failures, but many need execution context to get the fix right. Here's where prompts work, where they break down, and how Currents MCP fills the gap.

Tools

Migrating from Selenium to Playwright: The Complete Guide

Migrating from Selenium to Playwright is more than rewriting tests. This guide covers costs, risks, timelines, and how teams actually do it.

Playwright

Human-in-the-Loop Testing: Best Practices to Combine AI and Human QA

AI can run tests, but humans must decide outcomes. Learn how teams combine AI and human QA using human-in-the loop testing best practices.

Playwright

State of Playwright AI Ecosystem in 2026

Why has AI adoption accelerated in Playwright? Why does its ecosystem seem to absorb new capabilities so naturally, from autonomously planning test flows to self-healing failing steps?

Playwright

When Tests Should Run Headless vs Headed in Playwright

When should you run tests in headless vs headed mode in Playwright? Learn the differences between the two modes and when to use each.

Playwright

9 Strategies to Get the Most Out of Playwright Test Agents

Learn how to get the most out of Playwright Test Agents and improve your test suite using new AI solutions.

Playwright

Playwright MCP: How It Works and Where It Fits in CI

How the Playwright MCP server drives a browser, how to set it up headless, and how to get the tests it drafts ready for your CI suite.

Playwright

AI Skill: Playwright Best Practices

Empower your AI Agents to write, debug, and maintain Playwright tests with expert knowledge.

Playwright

How To Debug Playwright Tests in CI: The Complete Guide

Struggling with Playwright tests failing only in CI? Here's how to debug them with tracing, verbose logs, and consistent environments to find the root cause.

Playwright

How To Adopt Playwright the Right Way

Thinking about adopting Playwright but don't know where to start? Here's everything you need to be aware about before getting started.

Playwright

How To Speed Up Playwright Tests: 7 Tips From Experts

As Playwright suites grow, runtimes climb and CI slows. Learn strategies on how to speed up Playwright tests and reduce delays in your workflow.

Playwright

How To Measure Code Coverage in Playwright Tests

Learn how to measure and increase Playwright code coverage and ensure your tests stay reliable.

Playwright

Optimizing Test Runtime: Playwright Sharding vs. Workers

Long Playwright test runtimes slow CI pipelines. We compare Playwright workers vs. sharding, and when test orchestration becomes the better alternative.

Playwright

How To Build Reliable Playwright Tests: A Cultural Approach

Flaky Playwright tests waste time and trust. Follow best practices and this cultural approach to build stable, team-owned tests that scale with your product.

Playwright

How to Run Playwright Tests Without the Pain: 14 Lessons Learned after 500+ Tests

A reader-submitted guide sharing 14 lessons learned from writing 500 Playwright tests — essential tips for beginners to avoid common pitfalls.

Playwright

How to Track the Health of Your Playwright Test Suite

Passing tests can hide broken workflows. Understand how test automation analytics track key metrics to keep your Playwright test suite healthy.

Playwright

What Is a Flaky Test in Software Testing, and How to Fix It

What is a flaky test? Learn why flaky tests cause false failures, waste CI/CD time, and how to fix them to keep your test suite reliable.

Playwright

Debugging Playwright Timeouts: A Practical Checklist

Stuck with Playwright timeouts? Learn how to debug different Playwright timeouts using our practical checklist and stabilize your test suite.

Company News

AWS us-east-1 Outage Report

This document summarizes the incident, the actions taken to restore service and the preventative improvements we are implementing.

Tools

Alternative to Microsoft Playwright Workspaces

Microsoft Playwright Workspaces vs Currents

Playwright

Best Playwright Tools to Supercharge Your Testing in 2025

Playwright has quickly become one of the most popular frameworks for end-to-end testing. Out of the box it gives you fast, reliable browser automation, but the real power comes from its ecosystem.

Tools

Alternative to DataDog for Playwright Testing

DataDog vs Currents

Tools

Alternative to LambdaTest for Playwright Testing

LambdaTest vs Currents - a comparison of Currents with LambdaTest for Playwright testing reporting.

Tools

Alternative to ReportPortal for Playwright Testing

ReportPortal vs Currents

Product Updates

Introducing Currents MCP Server

Connect your AI tools to Currents using MCP

Tools

Alternative to BrowserStack for Playwright Testing

BrowserStack vs Currents

Tools

Alternative to Microsoft Playwright Testing

Microsoft Playwright Testing vs Currents

Product Updates

Currents Achieves SOC 2 Type 2 Certification

Achieving SOC 2 Type 2 Certification: A Milestone in Our Ongoing Commitment to Security and Compliance!

Tools

Alternative to Allure Report for Playwright Testing

Allure Report vs Currents

Company News

Company Update - January 2025

In this blog post we share what to expect from 2025 and reflect on our achievements from the previous year.

Product Updates

Currents Achieves SOC 2 Type 1 Certification

We're happy to announce that Currents has successfully completed the SOC 2 Type 1 examination!

Playwright

From Cypress to Playwright - cost, migration steps, timeline and AI tools

We collaborated wih dozen of teams that migrated from Cypress to Playwright. We discuss the cost of migration, migration steps and timeline, tips for smooth migration and adoption, use of AI tools to automate the migration.

Playwright

Cypress vs Playwright for tech leaders: cost and risks analysis

Cypress vs Playwright from a tech leader perspective: cost of ownership, cost of running tests in CI, risks, best practices of migration between the frameworks.

Playwright

Cypress vs Playwright - Flakiness Analysis

Comparing Cypress and Playwright Test Flakiness Using Currents Data.

Product Updates

Currents Update - May 2024

May 2024: latest updates from Currents - looking back at the last few months and sharing our plans for the future.

Product Updates

Playwright Reporter for Currents v1.0.0 ✨

We are thrilled to announce the next major release of the most advanced Playwright Reporter. It brings significant improvements: full parallel mode support, step-level reporting stored directly in the cloud, and CI runs orchestration that is up to 40% faster compared to native Playwright sharding.

Company News

Cypress.io Blocking of Sorry Cypress and Currents

On September 27, 2023, Cypress.io activated a blocking that affected Sorry Cypress users and Currents customers. This blog post breaks down the technical implementation of the blocking, analyses the reasons and clarifies Currents position.

Tools

Cypress test replays with Cypress Debugger

Capture and replay everything that is happening in Cypress during CI runs with a free, open-source plugin. Debug your failed and flaky CI cypress tests by replaying execution traces.

Cypress

GitHub Actions Matrix Job URL for Parallel Cypress Tests

A tutorial on how to get a GitHub Actions Matrix Job URL in Cypress tests. This is useful for getting a reference to the specific matrix build job from cypress terminal output.

Company News

Currents has joined TinySeed

Currents is a TinySeed company! We are joining a year-long accelerator program and a strong community of ambitious founders of bootstrapped SaaS companies

Cypress

Cypress Dashboard vs Currents - Ultimate Comparison Guide

A detailed comparison guide between Cypress Dashboard and the most popular alternatives - Currents and Sorry Cypress. Pricing, analytics, orchestration, load balancing, compatibility, parallelization, integrations and unit economics are compared between the solutions.

Cypress

Parallelizing Cypress with Jenkins, AWS, and Sorry Cypress

If you're using Jenkins, and you have access to cloud compute resources, you can run cypress in parallel across multiple virtual machines. This will significantly cut down your cypress run time. This article is a recipe for how to do that.

Tools

Cypress parallelization tools comparison

Overview of the best strategies for cypress tests parallelization and test execution tracking. I investigated Cypress Dashboard, Sorry Cypress, Currents, Cypress-Parallel, and a manual parallelization approach.

Product Updates

Currents is out of Beta

After 6 months of continuous improvements and 20+ millions of cypress tests recorded, we are excited to announce that Currents.dev is out of beta!