Cypress vs Katalon Studio

From $75 per month (Cloud, entry team plan)

From $175 per licence/month (indicative, annual)

You only pay for Cypress Cloud. Costs scale with recorded test results, so a large suite on every PR is the expensive shape.

Pricing is tiered by licence type (Studio, Runtime Engine, TestOps) and adds up quickly once you need parallel CI execution.

The test runner is free forever. Cypress Cloud free tier covers a limited number of recorded test results per month.

Katalon Studio Free covers local test creation and execution with limited features.

Category standard

Cypress.io · since 2017

Widely used

Katalon, Inc. · since 2016

• The interactive runner is the best onboarding experience in E2E testing; a new developer writes a passing test in minutes.
• Excellent documentation and one of the largest plugin ecosystems.
• Component testing and E2E in one tool with one config.

• One tool spanning web, API, mobile and desktop, which avoids stitching four frameworks together.
• Manual testers become productive in days rather than months.
• Built-in reporting and test management reduce the number of separate purchases.

• Runs in the same event loop as your app, which historically meant no multi-tab, multi-origin or iframe-heavy testing without workarounds. Support has improved but the model still constrains you.
• JavaScript and TypeScript only.
• Meaningful parallelisation effectively requires paying for Cypress Cloud.

• Record-and-playback suites become brittle at scale unless someone refactors them into keywords and objects.
• Proprietary project format makes migrating away expensive — real lock-in.
• Heavy desktop IDE; version control and code review are awkward compared to plain-text tests.

Front-end teams who value developer experience and live in a single-origin JavaScript app.

QA teams without dedicated automation engineers that need coverage across several platforms.