TestCafe 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

DevExpress · since 2016

Widely used

Katalon, Inc. · since 2016

• Zero setup: no drivers, no browser downloads, works on any installed browser including mobile Safari on a real phone.
• Automatic waiting and stable selectors with very little configuration.
• Genuinely simple concurrency flag for parallel runs.

• 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 proxy architecture occasionally breaks on apps with strict CSP, service workers or unusual auth flows.
• Smaller community and slower ecosystem growth than Playwright or Cypress.
• No component testing story.

• 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.

Small teams who want a working cross-browser suite with the least possible setup.

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