Katalon Studio vs Reflect

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

Free tier available

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.

Now sold on a credit model — Premium 5,000 credits a month, Advanced 20,000, Enterprise 40,000, all with unlimited users — and SmartBear does not publish the prices, so you need a quote. Credits are consumed by test runs, so concurrency and suite size drive the bill.

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

14-day trial.

Widely used

Katalon, Inc. · since 2016

Emerging

SmartBear (formerly Reflect Software) · since 2019

• 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.

• Nothing to install; a non-technical colleague can record a regression test in ten minutes.
• Handles file uploads, iframes and email verification, which trip up many no-code tools.
• Transparent published pricing, which is rare in this segment.

• 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, so testing a private environment requires network work.
• Not suited to very large suites or heavy conditional logic.
• Small vendor — check longevity if this becomes critical infrastructure.

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

Startups that need ten critical journeys covered without owning a framework.