Katalon Studio vs Rainforest QA

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

Quote on request

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

Quote-based. Human-executed runs are billed separately from automated ones and are the expensive component.

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

Free tier for a small number of automated tests.

Widely used

Katalon, Inc. · since 2016

Emerging

Rainforest QA · since 2012

• 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.

• The human fallback covers scenarios automation genuinely cannot reach.
• Anyone on the team can author a test.
• Results in minutes, integrated into the deployment pipeline.

• 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.

• Human runs get expensive quickly at any real frequency.
• Human testers lack product context, so results need interpretation.
• Web only.

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

Teams that need broad release-gate coverage including flows nobody wants to automate.