Karate vs Schemathesis

Free tier available

Free tier available

Open source core; Karate Labs sells a commercial IDE and enterprise support separately.

Open source. A commercial hosted service exists for reporting and continuous runs.

The open-source framework is complete and free.

The CLI and Python library are open source and free.

Widely used

Karate Labs · since 2017

Established

Schemathesis · since 2019

• One DSL covers functional API tests, mocks and load tests — rare consolidation.
• Powerful JSON matching that removes most assertion boilerplate.
• Non-Java testers can write meaningful tests.

• Enormous coverage for almost no authoring effort — the schema is the test suite.
• Reliably finds unhandled server errors and schema violations that manual tests miss.
• Failures come with a minimal reproducing case.

• The custom DSL is another language to learn and cannot be refactored by an IDE.
• Debugging complex scenarios is harder than in plain code.
• The UI automation feature is far behind dedicated browser tools.

• Only as good as your schema; a vague or inaccurate spec produces noise.
• Tests conformance, not business correctness — it cannot know a discount was miscalculated.
• Generated failures can be tedious to triage at first.

Teams wanting API testing and mocking in one tool, including non-Java testers.

Any team with an accurate OpenAPI spec who wants deep coverage cheaply.