Robot Framework 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.

Widely used

Robot Framework Foundation · since 2008

Widely used

Katalon, Inc. · since 2016

• Non-developers can read and often write the tests, which matters in QA-led organisations.
• Extends far beyond browsers: databases, SSH, serial, network equipment.
• Extremely stable and well-supported in regulated and telecom environments.

• 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 keyword abstraction fights you once logic gets complex; you end up writing Python behind the keywords anyway.
• Verbose syntax and whitespace-sensitive files that are awkward to review in a diff.
• Feels dated next to modern JavaScript tooling, and hiring is harder.

• 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.

QA-led and regulated organisations where readability by non-programmers is a requirement.

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