Testim vs Katalon Studio

Quote on request

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

Quote-based beyond the free tier; priced by annual test runs.

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 plan with a limited monthly run allowance.

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

Established

Tricentis · since 2014

Widely used

Katalon, Inc. · since 2016

• Smart locators handle everyday UI churn well.
• The escape hatch to real JavaScript keeps complex cases possible.
• Reusable shared steps keep large recorded suites maintainable.

• 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.

• Test logic lives in the vendor's cloud rather than your repository, which complicates review and branching.
• Run-based pricing punishes running the full suite on every commit.
• Post-acquisition roadmap is bound to the wider Tricentis strategy.

• 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.

Teams with fast-changing UIs that need maintenance to stay low.

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