Katalon Studio Reviews

I am the manager of a team that provides testing services to clients and we use Kalaton Studio for test automation (mainly for web applications) as well as Jira which we use for test management.

Most of our Katalon Studio deployments are based on a private cloud because we work with companies that have particular concerns about security and they prefer to use either private cloud or on-premises infrastructure with machines internal to the company.

Being based in Portugal, our team size isn't that big compared with other countries like Germany, UK, or the United States. Thus, we are not officially partners with Katalon, but sometimes our clients ask us to facilitate the reselling of Katalon Studio.

Katalon Studio's biggest advantage is its price. It's a good tool for the price, albeit with some limitations when you compare it with tools like Tricentis Tosca. However, these tools are in completely differently leagues, just like in football where you have the National league and the Championship league. For specific needs, given its price, Katalon Studio is a good solution.

One aspect that can be improved is testing for desktop applications. I would like to see them support more technologies in this area. For example, Tosca, in contrast to Katalon Studio, has support for more than 150 different technologies.

I have been working with Katalon Studio for about 18 months. 

It is a stable product.

We have previously used Micro Focus UFT One and Tosca, and we also have experience using Selenium and Cypress in specific situations.

It's tricky to say whether the setup is easy or not in an absolute sense. In some cases, it's very straightforward, and in general it is easy to set up. We usually take a few days for the installation of Katalon Studio.

We implement Katalon Studio as part of a comprehensive solution that we provide as a service for clients, and it is just one piece of the whole solution. The number of people involved in the initial deployment is completely dependent on the size of the project and the stringency of the security required, but it usually only takes one or two people.

We have seen return on investment, but it depends on the application that you need to test. It's like a car; if you buy an expensive car that supports hundreds of thousands of kilometers without expensive repairs in the garage, you get the payback on that investment. And if you buy an expensive car and you only want to use the car on weekends, e.g. 100 kilometers per weekend, you might die before you get return on that investment. So it all depends.

In terms of pricing, Katalon, Selenium, and Cypress all represent a similar level of investment. The software for these tools are either true open source or almost open source (because they charge a small fee), so pricing is a neutral point for me. The price isn't a problem. It's all about compatibility with the application undergoing testing.

If you took twice as many hours to finish something that in another tool you could finish in half the time, then it represents an unnecessary cost. What you don't spend in license fees, you may be spending in the service itself, or in people to support it. These are costs that may become evident later.

Other test automation tools that we evaluated are products that we have used previously such as Micro Focus UFT One and open source tools like Selenium and Cypress.

When it comes to Selenium, it is more of a scripting language, while Katalon is a keyword-driven solution in which you can use visual programming.

The biggest piece of advice I can give to others is to first analyze whether the tool is compatible with the application to undergo testing.

I would rate Katalon Studio a seven out of ten. 

For Katalon Studio we tried using it for record and play tasks. We could test it on Windows and different operating systems, such as macOS.

I did a small POC and during that time I found the product to be very easy to use. I'd describe it as extremely user-friendly.

There's a lot of information that is readily available on the internet, and therefore it's easy to learn about the product itself.

The scalability of the product is good.

The solution was quite stable throughout the time I used it.

We found the installation process to be quite simple. There is also very helpful online documentation that can help you if you ever get stuck during the implementation process itself.

As of now, the product has a complete packet and they could develop more on it. It definitely could improve the interface as well for mobile. While I didn't use it too much while I was working with the solution at the time, I am using mobile a lot now, and I see how helpful it is to have a good interface in place. 

The price of the solution is a bit high. It's one of the reasons we decided not to continue using the product.

I didn't use the solution for very long. I did a small POC for about one month or so.

The stability of the solution was quite good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance is great.

The solution is quite scalable. If you go ahead and use the paid version, you can expand it as you need to.

At the time, we had eight to ten people using the solution, however, we are no longer using it, and therefore do not have plans to scale or increase usage.

I personally never dealt with technical support. We had a team member in DevOps that would sometimes touch base with them. I can't speak to any personal experience, however.

We have used, and continue to use, an in-house automation tool. When that company developed our SIEM work, we built custom SEIM for work in Java and Selenium.

We simply tried Katalon as we were using different operating systems and we wanted to try a solution that worked across them.

The initial setup was not complex at all. The installation was very easy. The configuration, as well, was very straightforward. There are videos online that really help in walking you through the process. If you get stuck at any point you can watch them and they really help navigate you through the process.  

I can't recall exactly how long the process took to complete. 

In terms of maintenance, basically, there was one DevOps employee who was doing everything related to the maintenance part. We also had a manager heading it up. We were basically in different scrum teams and we were working on the same product. We only needed one person to look after everything and manage it as necessary. 

Originally, we did pay a licensing fee, however, the company decided not to continue with the product in the end. For us, it was too expensive.

On Katalon I didn't work much. I did a small POC and it was just for one month. After that, I switched back to our native and our custom in-house automation tool.

We didn't deploy it on the cloud due to the fact that initially, it was freeware, and then it got paid. At that point, our company was not interested in investing that amount of money into a new product when they had their own custom-built solution. They were parallelly building the automation framework in Java and Selenium. They're using test engines for reporting. Going forward, we will be using this framework and not Katalon.

I would recommend the solution to others. I would rate it at an eight out of ten.

We have an application that's for secure point management. There are different values on it, starting from PR creation to PO, etc. We log into the application and then create a PR and then a PO, and from there we can run functional test cases.

We use it to identify important areas for regression testing. 

There is a free version of the solution.

The best thing about the solution is that there is a record and playback functionality. 

The solution allows for specific object files. 

The solution has great multi-parallel languages that work in the facilities here.

The free version of the solution is not user friendly at all.

The solution's most valuable aspect is related to the record and playback. However, they need to improve the record and playback facility. TestComplete and UFT both have a much better record and playback functionality in comparison. It's one of the main reasons why I have, for example, inline tools, like UFT 5.0. 

They need to improve their object repository.

The solution isn't as mature as TestComlete or UFT. Although they are continuously writing more functionalities, this is one area they really need to improve in.

Technical support needs to be improved upon.

We've been using the solution for three to four years now.

The solution is okay in terms of stability, but just not as stable as TestComplete or UFT, two of its competitors.

We have five people working with the solution right now. 

This solution was being extensively used on a daily basis in our organization.

However, for the last couple of months we are not using it as much as we were using it. From February, we have reduced the usage of Katalon because we are working on a replacement solution. We're very cost-conscious and the new tool provides us with more value. 

The solution does have potential to scale. It would be pretty easy to do so if a company needed to.

We've contacted technical support in the past. The support is basically a site where you can record your issues. The feedback I've received from my team is that it's not great technical support and they aren't fully satisfied.

We actually started with a solution called Selenium. However, the Selenium GUI was not as comprehensive and the solution itself was not easy to use. We moved to Katalon due to the fact that it was free of charge, and had the record and playback facilities we required.

The initial setup wasn't complex. It was straightforward. I found it to be quite easy.

Due to the fact the process wasn't that difficult, we handled the installation of the solution in-house with our own team.

There is a free version of the solution. That said, companies should be aware that if they do go ahead with the freemium version, the effort required to do the work is extremely high and might negate the positive aspect of having a "free" solution.

We've since looked at both UFT and TestComplete. Katalon is cheaper, however, it doesn't offer everything we need and its features aren't as robust as the other two.

We're using the solution as a customer and don't have any sort of relationship or contract with Katalon.

The company gave us a demo to try that includes approximately seven or eight sessions of training to all 15 resources. However, Katalon also has lesson fees associated with the solution. That means we have to spend money, and we need to be strategic and careful now when considering which tool we need to invest in. That's why we are basically working on different tools, including UFT and TestComplete.

We are working with the 4.0 and 5.0 versions, however versions 7.0 and 8.0 have also launched at this point.

Katalon is a good tool if we are comparing it with a developer tool. It's the cheaper option too, however, is not as mature as compared to the other competitors. The lack of maturity may be why it's cheaper.

If a company is looking to buy a user-friendly software testing tool while having to pay less money, Katalon may be the best option as compared to UFT or TestComplete.

I'd rate the solution overall six out of ten.

We are currently trialing the solution's test automation functionality.

The recording feature of this product is very valuable for our testing purposes.

We would like to see improved integration with various reporting tools; this would make our testing data more complete.

We have been working with this solution for six months.

We have found the solution to be stable during our trials.

The solution is easily scalable in our experience.

We have found the technical support for this product to be very good, and knowledgeable.

Positive

The setup of this solution was very simple for a simple web application, and deployment only took 20 minutes.  However, for multiple applications, the lack of integration makes implementation a longer process.

We would recommend this product for a standalone web application use case, but we would suggest that any business using multiple web applications, should try the solution beforehand using the open-source version that is available.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I'm a senior software test automation engineer and we are customers of Katalon. 

This solution is good for us. It's easy to use and a good product. I like the self-healing plug-in feature which, as far as I am aware, is not available in any other product on the market.

Katalon lacks integration ability with other software, including integrating other languages like .NET and PHP. I've also had issues with new releases as the system often crashes and the previous version is no longer supported on a particular feature. More testing needs to be carried out before new versions are released. I'd like to be able to export our test system to any other product. This is currently not possible. Finally, the product only supports XPath and not CSS. CSS is faster than XPath and most companies want to use it. There are a lot of solutions on the market and if an end-user has too many problems with a product, they will jump to a new one. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

Stability is one of the main issues with the system crashing if there's a new release that hasn't been sufficiently tested. The fixes can come after a couple of days but sometimes it can take a couple of months.  

The solution is scalable. 

I haven't used the support for a while but they were good. The community is also very helpful. 

I previously worked with Selenium WebDriver and also with Ranorex. 

The cost is on the high side and it would be helpful if there were two packages available with a distinction made between the standard features most companies are looking for at a cheaper cost and a second, more expensive license option for those wanting additional features such as auto exports. If Katalon were to do this, I think more of the smaller companies would be interested in using the solution. 

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

Our primary use is for web automation.

We are an IT consulting services company. As part of our services, we provide testing services. That is why we are constantly looking for some tools and frameworks that might fit with our clients' needs.

We call ourselves agnostic, which means we are not going to be with only one provider. However, I've seen very powerful things behind the Katalon.

I find Katalon Studio to be a very complete product. Our clients have requested all types of testing, including mobile, desktop, and API testing and all of those are covered by Katalon. I find that very valuable, very complete.

I've seen that our clients are not truly aware of the power behind Katalon. Many of the clients are now ready for the traditional Selenium, perhaps a more friendly layer like Cucumber or SpecFlow. But I think they will understand if we start doing automation with Katalon and they would be much more interested. The automation developers are starting to have really high demand and the salaries have increased, so with Katalon they might be interested in two things - the velocity of testing plus bringing manual testing to the automation world.

I have been using Katalon Studio for about a half year, now. I use it for demo purposes with our clients.

We previously utilized Katalon for demo purposes. We also used Selenium, not Selenium HQ, but Selenium alone. And I think we are utilizing Cypress and Cucumber with Selenium, in different flavors of languages, et cetera.

I haven't precisely checked the business model behind Katalon, and I would like to understand that as well, because most of our clients ask for licenses and prices, and we don't know. From my understanding, the basic version is free, but it would be interesting to understand the full package.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Katalon Studio an 8.

I use it for automated testing. I am not using the latest version because their patches come out rather quickly. I can't patch as quickly.

I like the feature where you can define a model that represents your website and then reuse the components from the model. It makes creating more test cases easy.

One improvement would be if it could support more programming languages such as JavaScript or Python. Right now, it is only on Groovy, which I think is not a too popular language. 

Other than that, we would want to see new features in every update. We would welcome any kind of improvement in terms of performance, etc.

I have been using this solution for a year.

Its stability and performance are okay and acceptable.

I am not in a good position to comment on this because I didn't try that out. Currently, we have less than 50 users. 

They are pretty good. They did address my problem. I am satisfied with their support.

It is actually a complex setup. If you want to do it in a good and sustainable way, it is complex to create a model, but if you want to just test things out and very quickly try out this product, then it is easy to get started. So, it is complex to create something that is sustainable. 

Overall, it took about one and a half to two months, which included many test cases implementations. The setup was done within a week.

It does require maintenance, but the maintenance of the server is up to your company policy. It depends on how often you patch your server, and how often you upgrade Java. The maintenance of the test scripts depends on how quickly the product changes. So, it varies.

I was using help from the proprietary vendor.

Its pricing is quite reasonable. If you require their help in getting started, then there is a professional services fee on top of the product license cost.

I would recommend engaging Katalon's services to get started. They do render pretty good help on it.

I would rate Katalon Studio an eight out of 10.

We are using it for API testing. I am just running it from my local machine. I am using it just locally.

It has been good so far for API testing on Mac. It is not that hard to learn and use. There is so much support out there, so if anyone wants to start using it, there is enough help.

Currently, I'm the only one who can use it because I have a Mac. It is giving a hard time to my team members who are on Linux. My team members are using Linux, and Katalon doesn't support Linux very well. It keeps on crashing. It crashes and shuts down almost every time they save their work, so they are not able to use it. It should have good support for Linux. We don't know what the problem is. If the Katalon team can pick up this issue, it will be very helpful.

It is a bit slow. The other tools on my Mac are not slow, but Katalon is slow. 

It has been more than six months.

I worked on Postman, but for RPA automation, I just started working with Katalon.

It was easy. I just had to double-click on Mac.

I am using the free version.

It should support all operating systems. Most of the developers use a Linux machine, but it doesn't support Linux. I would like an update from the Katalon team about why it is not working properly on a Linux machine.

I would rate it a six out of 10. It is a good product, but it needs some improvements.