Nightwatch.js vs Katalon Studio

Free and open source

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

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

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

Established

BrowserStack · since 2014

Widely used

Katalon, Inc. · since 2016

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Teams already on BrowserStack who want an integrated JavaScript framework.

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