Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
From $175 per licence/month (indicative, annual)
Free tierQuote on request
Quote onlyWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Pricing is tiered by licence type (Studio, Runtime Engine, TestOps) and adds up quickly once you need parallel CI execution.
Quote-based beyond the free tier; priced by annual test runs.
Free tier
Katalon Studio Free covers local test creation and execution with limited features.
Free plan with a limited monthly run allowance.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Katalon, Inc. · since 2016
Established
Tricentis · since 2014
Strengths
Limitations
Best for
QA teams without dedicated automation engineers that need coverage across several platforms.
Teams with fast-changing UIs that need maintenance to stay low.
All of these integrate with: Jira, Jenkins, Slack.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.