Click. Test. Deliver...
Poland has firmly established itself as a key hub for IT and software quality assurance in Europe, with QA automation at the center. Companies are investing heavily in automated testing to accelerate delivery, ensure reliability, and keep pace with continuous integration pipelines. Among the most popular tools, Selenium remains the go-to for cross-browser, multi-language automation, while Cypress has surged in popularity for its speed, simplicity, and modern JavaScript-based approach. For today’s QA Automation Engineer in Poland, choosing between these tools often comes down to team skills, target browsers, and CI/CD1 fit.
As we move deeper into 2025, AI integration is no longer a buzzword but a daily reality in QA. From self-healing test scripts to intelligent test generation and predictive defect analysis, AI is reshaping how Polish teams design, execute, and maintain automation suites. The promise is clear: faster cycles, fewer false positives, and smarter insights.
Where’s Poland leaning? Adoption signals from GitHub Trending and Curioz.io, blended with job-offer and signed-contract indexes plus salary shifts, reveal how teams balance Selenium’s reach against Cypress’s developer experience.
1 CI/CD - Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment: automated pipelines that build, test, and release code so changes ship safely and frequently.
From Selenium to Something New
Curioz.io’s combined market and signed-contract research shows Poland’s testing landscape is shifting fast: Selenium’s share has collapsed from over 40% in late 2024 to just 22% by August 2025, while Cypress has held steady at around 16–20% without capturing much of that migration. The real growth is in the “Others” category, which has surged past 60%, driven by Playwright and emerging AI-based QA solutions.
On GitHub, however, the signals look very different. Cypress enjoys far greater visibility, 45k stars compared to Selenium’s 26k, with stronger contributor activity and a reputation for speed and developer friendliness. While Cypress is relatively easy to enhance with AI for tasks like test generation and debugging, enterprises are accelerating adoption of next-generation frameworks and AI-driven automation, sometimes bypassing Cypress entirely. This shift is most visible in the rapid growth of Playwright and AI-native QA tools capturing the market share lost by Selenium.
From Tie to Trend
Curioz.io data shows a clean flip in median rates for Senior QA Automation (B2B). Both Cypress and Selenium median hourly rates hovered near 140 PLN/h in November 2024. Their medians crossed in November ’24-December ’25. By spring–summer 2025 the Cypress median was up ~6-7%, while the Selenium median fell ~9-10% by August 2025.
Methodology & baseline: Rates are Curioz.io medians for Senior QA Automation Engineers on B2B contracts (weighted index of job ads and signed contracts), classified by primary stack (Cypress vs. Selenium). Median = midpoint (50th percentile), half earn more, half less, so outliers don’t skew it.
November 2024 is the baseline (~140 PLN/h for both); all 2025 movements are measured relative to that month.
After near-parity in late 2024, the medians flipped. Cypress pulled ahead as Selenium slipped. That wasn’t just a price move, it signaled what the market values in Senior QA Automation.
This reversal underscores a broader market message: stack choice has become a pay lever. Cypress is rewarded for accelerating delivery, simplifying test authoring, easy AI integration and reducing flakiness, critical in CI/CD-heavy environments. Salaries for Cypress roles also remain slightly higher than for Selenium, because the smaller but steady pool of Cypress specialists creates a skills bottleneck: demand from JavaScript-heavy teams exceeds supply, keeping pay elevated. Selenium, while still entrenched in legacy infrastructures and enterprise regressions, is increasingly viewed as the conservative choice: it carries cost rather than delivering leverage.
Pick speed, stability, innovation. Get the premium.
For QA professionals, this signals more than just a tooling preference. It’s a financial incentive to modernize skill sets. Mastery of Cypress positions engineers closer to developers in full-stack teams and directly impacts earning power. Selenium expertise, unless combined with migration or modernization leadership, risks being discounted in the market.
QA in Poland Rewards Modern Stacks
Poland’s QA is shifting from “tool wars” to “outcomes + intelligence”. Selenium is fading, Cypress is holding ground, and Playwright plus AI-native tooling are surging. Engineers can win either by moving to Playwright+AI or by adopting Cypress+AI for test generation, self-healing, and smarter flakiness control. Pay signals confirm it: from a ~140 PLN/h baseline (Nov ’24), Cypress medians are up ~6-7% while Selenium medians are down ~9-10% by Aug ’25, rewarding modern stacks and penalizing legacy-only skills. The 2025+ QA standout is the product-minded engineer who designs maintainable automation, orchestrates AI, and plugs tightly into CI/CD. Teams that modernize ship faster with fewer defects, and the engineers who adopt Cypress, Playwright and AI capture the salary upside.
QA Automation Engineer Is the Perfect Fit for Talent-as-a-Service (TaaS)
Most of 2025 is about AI-powered QA, resilient automation with self-healing, AI-generated tests, and predictive defects in CI/CD. That’s exactly where a QA Automation Engineer with modern stacks (PlaywrightCypress/Selenium) and built-in guardrails excels.
Why you need a QA Automation Engineer to stay competitive?
- expand test coverage and delivery speed (days → weeks, not quarters);
- cut maintenance cost & flakiness → better margins and faster releases;
- turn product data into leverage (AI-driven prioritization tied to KPIs);
- build safe, compliant QA pipelines with guardrails from day one;
- stay tool-flexible across Selenium , Cypress, Playwright, and AI frameworks to avoid lock-in.
TaaS engagement pattern (30/60/90)
- 0–30 days: discovery → baseline KPIs, spike prototypes, readiness audit, automation strategy;
- 31–60 days: expand coverage, add guardrails, integrate with CI/CD and telemetry, pilot with users;
- 61–90 days: production rollout, cost/perf optimization, dashboarding, ops runbook.
Competitors are already moving. Add a TaaS QA Automation Engineer now to keep your edge, and compound it every sprint.
NOTE: This post is based on research by Inuits.it and Curioz.io, and has been crossposted on both platforms.