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.
Enterprise licensing only, negotiated annually. Six-figure contracts are normal at scale.
Free tier
Katalon Studio Free covers local test creation and execution with limited features.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Katalon, Inc. · since 2016
Widely used
Tricentis · since 2007
Strengths
Limitations
Best for
QA teams without dedicated automation engineers that need coverage across several platforms.
Large enterprises running SAP or similar packaged systems where no open-source tool reaches.
All of these integrate with: Jira, qTest, Jenkins, Azure DevOps.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.