Katalon Studio vs Puppeteer

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

Free and open source

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.

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Katalon, Inc. · since 2016

Widely used

Google · since 2017

• 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.

• Small, fast, and very well documented for Chrome-specific work.
• First-class access to the Chrome DevTools protocol for performance tracing and coverage.
• Excellent at non-test jobs: PDF rendering, screenshots, scraping.

• 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.

• No test runner, assertions, retries or reporting — you assemble all of it.
• Chrome and Firefox only; no WebKit.
• For E2E testing specifically, Playwright is a strict superset. Choose Puppeteer only when you want a minimal automation library.

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

Automation jobs that are not tests, or Chrome-only tooling where you want minimal dependencies.