We performed a comparison between Appium and Katalon Studio based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Regression Testing Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."I haven't explored other solutions in this particular area, but what I like best about Appium is the fact that it shares functions with Selenium. The extension of Selenium functions allows me to use all of the methods that exist in that domain, and it just makes it simpler for me. I've been using Selenium for some time as well, so using Appium just seems like a natural fit for me."
"We develop apps using the React Native framework, and Appium integrates well for testing those apps. The Appium automation framework also has good integration with GitHub Actions and plenty of other tools and frameworks, including BrowserStack."
"The most valuable features of Appium are the in-built functionality, which we can use in our code. For example, move back, move front, navigate one page before, and navigate one page ahead. You can do this by using the in-built functions from Appium."
"The latest versions of the solution are stable."
"The way Appium server interacts with mobile apps is fantastic. It provides all the information about the elements inside the app, Android as well as iOS. I can interact with the element quickly, just type some text or get some text values from the element - whether it's a drop-down, or web text, or a native element."
"Appium has easy interaction with mobile."
"It runs completely flawlessly and seamlessly every day."
"The solution is stable."
"The best thing about the solution is that there is a record and playback functionality."
"We can write code in Java and it is easy to link to other JARs that we find on the internet, which is very handy."
"The initial setup of Katalon Studio was easy."
"The most valuable feature of Katalon Studio is that everything can be managed from one platform."
"The automation is very fast and you don't need to be overly proficient in coding."
"One of the features that I like is Object Recognition. It worked very well, and it allowed me to create a dynamic expert based on my requirements."
"This solution is very user-friendly to learn and implement, and less technical knowledge is required to handle automation."
"Our clients have requested by 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."
"Image recognition could be improved. We have some images in our mobile applications. It should be able to run from the cloud, so we can automate the catcher."
"An application developed on the Unity platform, such as a gaming application, objects are moving in that case. Interacting with those elements is still lacking in Appium. Appium doesn't have the internal library to play with the Unity platform. That is a huge lack right now."
"Appium has problems with automated validations following iOS updates, causing us to have to validate manually."
"I rarely use Appium nowadays because I'm now at the managerial level, but the last time I used it, whenever I selected and clicked on an element, Appium was very slow. I tried to debug it, but I still couldn't find the problem, so this is an area for improvement in the solution. Another area for improvement lies with the connector and server. For example, the effort to get into the local machine sometimes causes the emulator to become slow, which then leads to failure in testing, and this is the usual issue I've encountered from Appium. An additional feature I'd like added to Appium in its next release is being able to do automation in iOS without using XPath and the name of the element. In Xcode, you can use previous UI tests for detecting elements, but in Appium, you have to use Xpath and the element name instead of being able to directly put the X-UiPath, which is what you can do in Xcode. In iOS as well, sometimes the element doesn't have a name or a path. Sometimes, there's also no element."
"What needs improvement in Appium is its documentation. It needs to give more context on the libraries that Appium is using under the hood. For example, my team is using Appium for Android automation, and a lot of times, I feel that there's functionality that's available through the Appium interface, that exists within the UIAutomator, but there aren't a lot of useful or helpful resources on the internet to find that information, so it would be good to have some linkage with the underlying platform itself. Another room for improvement in Appium is that it's buggy sometimes. For example, at times, there's a bug in the inspector application that doesn't allow me to save my desired capability set, so it would be nice to get that bug fixed, but overall, Appium is a good tool. The Touch Actions functionality in Appium also needs improvement. For example, if I want to initiate a scroll on the device that I'm running Appium on, sometimes Swipe works, but in other situations, I have to explicitly use action chains, so I'm not too sure what's the better approach. What I'd like to see in the next version of Appium is a more intelligent and more intuitive AppiumLibrary, in terms of identifying menus and scroll bars, etc., because right now, I'm unsure if I have to do a lot of export reversals to get to the elements I'm looking for. It would be nice to have some functionality built in, which would allow me to easily get those exports."
"The tool needs to add a dependency manager."
"Support-wise, it could be better."
"Stability is an area that needs some improvement."
"Support options need improvement. It is sometimes hard to find a solution to any given problem, thus you are forced to use another solution."
"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."
"There could potentially be more reporting within the solution. We need more issue reports, for example."
"We have had some issues when it comes to stability, which is something that needs to be improved."
"The price of the solution is a bit high. It's one of the reasons we decided not to continue using the product."
"It should start working on Silverlight automation."
"The tool's maintenance is very difficult since they do not follow call by value or call by reference. Due to this, any change happening is not reflected throughout all the test cases. There are some issues with data parameterization as well."
"Now we are having difficulties in using it and had to limit our automation experts to the features that Katalon allows us to use for free. It was free access and they claimed that it would be free for all time."
Appium is ranked 5th in Regression Testing Tools with 25 reviews while Katalon Studio is ranked 3rd in Regression Testing Tools with 41 reviews. Appium is rated 8.0, while Katalon Studio is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Appium writes "It's easy to launch applications". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Katalon Studio writes "Useful multiple technology platform, scalable, but usability could improve". Appium is most compared with Tricentis Tosca, Perfecto, Xamarin Platform, Apache JMeter and SmartBear TestComplete, whereas Katalon Studio is most compared with Tricentis Tosca, Postman, OpenText UFT One, Testim and Ranorex Studio. See our Appium vs. Katalon Studio report.
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