Robot Framework vs mabl

Free and open source

Quote on request

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

Quote-based, typically sold as an annual contract sized by test runs and users. Expect mid five figures for a team deployment.

Everything, self-hosted

14-day free trial.

Widely used

Robot Framework Foundation · since 2008

Established

mabl · since 2018

• 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.

• Self-healing genuinely reduces maintenance on UIs that change often.
• Auto-captured visual, performance and accessibility signals on every run without extra setup.
• Very little infrastructure to own — no grid, no runners.

• 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.

• Cloud-only. If your application is not reachable from mabl's infrastructure, the setup gets complicated.
• Complex conditional logic hits the ceiling of the low-code model.
• Opaque pricing and a substantial minimum commitment.

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

Mid-market teams that want broad automated coverage without hiring an automation team.