Once a test suite grows past a handful of specs, the results themselves become harder to manage than the tests. You need a way to store them, view them over time, and share them with the rest of the team. How you handle the reporting layer is often what separates a smooth CI pipeline from a noisy one.

For Playwright and Cypress teams, this usually comes down to a choice between two very different options: Allure Report and Currents. One is a free, open-source report you generate and host yourself. The other is a paid, hosted dashboard that takes care of it for you. We will look at how each works, what it really costs in money and effort, and when one makes more sense than the other.

Our quick take

This is not really a feature-for-feature fight. It is a decision about how much you want to run yourself.

Allure Report is a free, open-source (Apache 2.0) report generator. Your tests run, an adapter writes results, you run allure generate, and you get a static, interactive HTML report. There is no server, no account, and no monthly bill. There is also no hosting, no persistence, and no live view unless you build those yourself.

Currents is a paid, hosted cloud dashboard for Playwright and Cypress in CI. You add a reporter and runs stream into a live service with centralized traces and video across every CI machine, flaky detection, error grouping, and test orchestration. You pay (from $49/month) to make the operational work disappear.

So the question is not "which is better." It is "do I want a free artifact I host and maintain, or a paid service that hosts and maintains it for me?" Everything below is the detail behind that trade.

And if your suite is specifically Playwright, it's worth keeping TestDino on your radar as you read. It's a hosted, Playwright-native home with AI failure analysis and built-in test case management. We come back to why at the end.

What each one actually is

Allure Report

Allure Report is a static HTML report generator, not a test runner or a service. The official docs are blunt about it: "It does not run tests or manage test execution; it exclusively collects and analyzes data from already-executed tests."

The flow is simple. An adapter (there is an official one for Playwright, Cypress, and 50-plus other frameworks) writes structured results into an allure-results folder. You run allure generate, and out comes a portable HTML report you can archive, share, or host anywhere. For local viewing, there is allure serve (or allure open in Allure 3), which spins up a temporary local server. That is the only "server" in the free product.

Two versions are in play in mid-2026: Allure 2 (the mature, broadly integrated default) and Allure 3 (a newer TypeScript rewrite with a plugin system). Both ship stable releases. It is free under the Apache 2.0 license, maintained by Qameta Software with community contributors and Open Collective funding.

Currents

A montage of the Currents hosted dashboard, with the Currents logo alongside an overview panel, Playwright test-run detail, and analytics view. It shows the live, cloud-hosted experience Currents provides for Playwright and Cypress runs

Currents is the opposite model: a hosted service you pay for, so you do not have to run the plumbing. It started as the commercial evolution of the open-source Sory-Cypress project and is now Playwright-first. You add a reporter to your config and run stream into a cloud dashboard with one-click access to traces, screenshots, video, and console output across every shard and CI machine.

On top of that, it layers flaky detection with a stability percentage, an algorithmic error-grouping engine (Error Explorer), and "Smart Test Orchestration" that load-balances specs across machines based on historical durations to cut pipeline time. History, hosting, and sharing are handled.

The real difference: Hosting and persistence

This is the heart of it.

With Allure Report, every run produces a folder of static files. To make those files useful over time, you have to do three things yourself in CI:

1. Persist history. Trends and history only appear if you carry the history/ subfolder forward from the previous run (Allure 2) or maintain the history JSONL file (Allure 3). Miss a step, and your trend graphs are empty.
2. Host the output. The report is static HTML; you must publish it somewhere your team can access it. The only official step-by-step guide is GitHub Pages. S3, an artifact server, or the popular community allure-docker-service all work, but you are responsible for setting up and maintaining them.
3. Maintain configuration. Error categorization is regex rules in a categories.json file that your team writes and keeps up to date.

None of that is hard, but it is ongoing operational work that someone owns.

With Currents, all three are the product. History is automatic. Hosting is the SaaS. Error grouping is algorithmic out of the box. You pay so nobody on your team has to own the "where does this live and who maintains the history job" step.<

A lot of teams genuinely start on Allure Report, run into exactly that wall as the suite grows, and then go shopping for a hosted tool. That transition is the whole reason this comparison gets searched.

Flaky tests detection

It is a common misconception that Allure Report has no flaky detection. It does, but it works differently from a hosted dashboard.

Allure Report auto-marks a test as flaky using a fixed heuristic based on your history: the test failed at some point in the latest 5 launches, passed at least once since, and failed or broke in the latest launch. There is also a separate Retried mark for within-a-single-run flips. The catch: flaky detection requires the history file, which means you persist history across runs (see above). It is a fixed 5-launch window, not a configurable statistical analysis.

Currents performs server-side flaky detection using a stability percentage across your stored run history, auto-activated when retries are enabled, with a fail-fast option. Because history lives in the service, there is nothing for you to carry forward.

So the honest framing is: both detect flakes, but Allure's is a fixed-window heuristic over a history file you maintain. At the same time, Currents' is server-side analytics over history it keeps for you.

Playwright artifacts

If your suite is Playwright, this matters.

Allure Report handles Playwright through the official allure-playwright adapter and renders screenshots inline as attachments. The Playwright trace itself is, by default, a downloadable .zip attachment you open in the standalone Playwright Trace Viewer. An inline trace viewer in Allure is possible (Allure 3 and Allure 2 since 2.35.0), but it is gated by attaching the trace with a specific content type, and the docs for it were still being written in early 2026. Workable, but more assembly than a tool that does it natively.

Currents is built around Playwright artifacts: one-click time-travel trace viewer, screenshots, video replay, and console logs, centralized across every CI machine, plus real-time streaming that survives a runner crash. It is first-class because the product was designed to be so.

Where TestDino fits: Allure Report is free but operationally yours to run, and Currents is hosted but Playwright-only. If you want hosted Playwright depth plus AI failure analysis and test management together, TestDino covers that ground. More below.

What Allure Report does not do (vs a hosted dashboard)

Stated plainly, because these are the gaps that push teams to a paid tool:

• No test orchestration, parallelization, or load-balancing. The docs say so directly: it does not run tests. Currents load-balances specs across machines to cut wall-clock time.
• No real-time streaming from CI. Each report is a snapshot generated after the run. (There is a local auto-refresh for a developer on their own machine, which is not the same thing.)
• No centralized multi-run dashboard. Every report is a static snapshot; long-term comparison is something you assemble.
• No built-in PR comments or Slack. Those need third-party add-ons.
• No AI and no MCP. Categorization is regex, not AI. Currents has no AI engine of its own, either, but it does ship an official MCP server (@currents/mcp) so an agent can query your data; Allure Report ships nothing here.

What Currents asks in return

To be fair to Allure Report, Currents has its own costs:

• Money. From $49/month, usage-based on test results (+$5 per extra 1,000). Allure Report is free.
• Your data leaves your infrastructure. Currents is cloud-only, with US data residency (AWS us-east-1), and no self-hosted option for Currents itself. Allure Report is a file you host wherever you want, which is a more compliant answer for the most locked-down environments.
• Narrower framework focus. Currents is Playwright/Cypress-first. Allure Report is genuinely framework-agnostic across 50-plus frameworks and 8 languages, so for a polyglot suite, it covers ground Currents does not.

So which one should you pick?

• Pick Allure Report if cost is the priority, you are comfortable owning the history-persistence and hosting steps in CI, you want a framework-agnostic report for a mixed-language suite, or you need everything to stay on your own infrastructure. It is the default starting point for a reason.
• Pick Currents if you would rather pay than maintain plumbing; you want a live, hosted dashboard with centralized Playwright artifacts, flaky analytics, and orchestration that cuts pipeline time; and you do not want anyone on the team owning "where the reports live."

The mistake to avoid is comparing free and self-hosted against paid and managed as if they were the same kind of thing. They are solving the same problem at different points on the build-vs-buy line.

If your tests are Playwright, start here

If your suite is Playwright, neither of these was built specifically for you.

Allure Report is free but static, framework-agnostic, and operationally yours to run. Currents is hosted and Playwright-deep, but it stops short of test management, runs no AI of its own, and keeps your data US-only with no self-host.

If you want the hosted convenience and Playwright depth of Currents, plus AI that actually analyzes your failures rather than just exposing them, plus test case management in the same place, that is a different product.

TestDino is built for that middle.

• It is Playwright-native (built-in inline trace viewer, smart error grouping, flaky root-cause analysis)
• It classifies failures with AI rather than handing the data off
• It ships both local and remote MCP for Cursor, Claude Code, and Copilot, and it adds test case management, release tracking, and PR insights in one place.
• It is SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and GDPR compliant.
• Setup is 1 line: tdpw upload.
• It starts free with 5,000 executions per month and all core features, with Pro at $49/month

If "Allure Report vs Currents" was really you outgrowing free static reports and shopping for a hosted home for a Playwright suite, it is worth a look before you decide.

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