Leapwork vs Katalon Studio

Quote on request

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

Enterprise quote-based licensing, typically annual and sized by concurrent runners plus authoring seats.

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 trial.

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

Emerging

Leapwork · since 2015

Widely used

Katalon, Inc. · since 2016

• Genuinely usable by non-technical staff — the flowchart model is easier than any script-behind-a-recorder approach.
• Covers Citrix, virtual desktop and mainframe environments that most tools cannot touch.
• Doubles as an RPA platform, which can consolidate two budgets.

• 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.

• Flowcharts do not diff or merge, so version control is essentially unusable.
• Complex logic becomes an unreadable sprawl of blocks.
• Enterprise pricing with no small-team entry point.

• 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.

Enterprises where business users must own automation and Citrix or mainframe is in scope.

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