Katalon Studio vs mabl

From $84 per seat/month (Professional, billed annually; $184 month-to-month)

Quote on request

The seat price is only part of it: CI execution needs add-ons priced separately — Runtime Engine at $145/licence/month and cross-browser or mobile device sessions at $158/session/month — so a parallel CI setup costs several times the headline seat figure.

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

Free plan covers local authoring and execution for web, mobile and API.

14-day free trial.

Widely used

Katalon, Inc. · since 2016

Established

mabl · since 2018

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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