Katalon Studio vs Nightwatch.js

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

Free and open source

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

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

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

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Katalon, Inc. · since 2016

Established

BrowserStack · since 2014

• 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.

• Everything included: runner, assertions, page objects, reporting, parallelism.
• Very readable chained syntax that non-specialists pick up quickly.
• Tight BrowserStack integration if you already use that 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.

• Community is a fraction of Playwright's or Cypress's; fewer answers exist for edge cases.
• WebDriver-based, so it carries the usual latency and waiting caveats.
• Corporate stewardship by a device-cloud vendor is worth weighing if you plan to use a competitor.

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

Teams already on BrowserStack who want an integrated JavaScript framework.