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testcritic

Katalon Studio vs Testsigma

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

Entry price

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

Free tier

Free tier available

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

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.

Pro and Enterprise cloud plans use custom pricing. Request a quote for your team's platform coverage and execution needs. The community edition is free to self-host, with infrastructure and maintenance managed by your team.

Free tier

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

Apache-2.0 community edition, self-hosted — the GitHub repo is still actively maintained.

Open source

Apache-2.0 (community edition)

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

CodelessJavaKotlin
CodelessJava

Platforms

WebAPIiOSAndroidDesktop
WebAPIiOSAndroid

Fits teams

Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Katalon, Inc. · since 2016

Established

Testsigma Inc. · since 2019

Strengths

  • 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.
  • An open-source community edition adds a self-hosted option alongside the managed cloud.
  • Natural-language steps are readable by product owners.
  • Web, mobile and API in one authoring model.

Limitations

  • 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.
  • Structured natural-language steps use a defined syntax; plan time to learn it during onboarding.
  • The community and cloud editions differ in feature coverage; check the edition against your requirements.

Best for

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

QA teams that want readable web, mobile and API automation, with a choice of managed cloud or self-hosted deployment.

All of these integrate with: Jira, Jenkins, Slack, BrowserStack.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.