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. 

We're using it for API testing. It is deployed on my desktop.

It is good for API testing. It is also good for continuous integration testing. You can connect it to Jenkins.

I believe it would a great feature if they could integrate JMETER and other performance testing tools so that Katalon would become an all-in-one test automation tool

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

It is a reliable solution.

I have not scaled it or used any plug-in. Currently, we have less than five users of this product.

I haven't contacted their technical support because everything is okay.

It wasn't complex.

We are using the free version. We plan on getting a paid version because there is a limitation in terms of the number of users. We want to maximize it.

It is a mature product, and it is a good starting point for beginners. It is pretty much similar to the other tools in the market.

I would rate Katalon Studio an eight out of 10. It is not perfect, but it is an excellent tool.

We are using this product as a tool to teach students about testing. We are not teaching them how to use this specific tool. We are helping the students to understand how to find the right tools to do the testing on what they develop.  

fast learning curve tool (and profesional) for students new at the subject

The most valuable features for me are that Katalon Studio is powerful and yet easy-to-use. This solution — even in comparison to Selenium, which we were using previously — is a little bit more simple from a user's standpoint. It is interesting because it is not only focused on the end-user but interface testing — and that includes API testing. Even if we do not generally need to use it, it is interesting. We are a university and we have a very small department that is doing development testing of software. Most of the projects are not API-based. We still are employing some old client-server versions and software architecture. But the capability is still interesting looking forward.  

I have worked with the record and replay feature which helps to create test cases. It is quite useful for assisting in testing a user interface and a very good experience for students' understanding of procedures.  

I really do not know what every user who is using this product might need to make it better for them. I do not think this is an easy question to answer for users globally. I do not think there are any features that we need. We had a small problem with an update of the web browser, but we managed to figure it out. New features are not part of our usage for the product.  

I think the one thing that is more problematic for the product is the online documentation. It could be more centralized and better or just easier to find.  

We have been using Katalon Studio off and on as a teaching tool at our university for maybe two years.  

It is OK.
We had 3rd party problem (browser update) that broken the test case. But it was fixable.

We do not really have a reason to test the scalability, but it should be quite scalable. For the training project, it is only something students do for a few weeks. It depends on the team, but between two and six weeks, and no more. We get an average of about fifty students in their third year right now. They launch an initial development project including testing activity. The use of this kind of tools is optional and tool selection depends on the student group. The do not develop more than 2/3 sprints.

Within the department, we were previously using Selenium a few years back for teaching testing. We actually switched to Katalon from student suggestions. In the future, we may change again.  

The most important thing about the product is that we can use it to teach about testing. So it was not imperative to switch but it is also good for students to have varied product experiences.  

The initial setup takes a couple of weeks. That is not really too long for a product like this. It was relatively easy to do.  

One of my colleagues is in charge of teaching software engineering testing issues. When the students are tackling the testing project, they sometimes suggest using different tools. Some years ago it was Selenium, nowadays it is Katalon. Of course, there are other tools that perhaps in the future we will suggest to the students to use in their projects. We are not teaching them to be professional users of Katalon and we will continue to evaluate tools and take suggestions for future packages.  

In looking at Katalon Studio and comparing it with Selenium, I think Katalon is better. The capture and replay functionality for sure sets Katalon ahead. As far as the API testing, we have not tried to explore that part. I have only heard that Katalon is very powerful in that capacity. Katalon is easier to work with and to integrate. Those are the main strengths and the differences we have found between the products.  

I would rate Katalon Studio as an eight-of-ten overall on a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best. It should be considered that we are not very demanding users. We have not put a lot of stress on the product in our testing.  

To get a nine or ten, if they could provide some capabilities with artificial intelligence to help to assist testing models that could help people to improve in finding the best-case scenarios. Version testing might be an option as well. But Katalon is much closer to getting ten points than Selenium.  

We are using Katalon Studio for test automation. There are multiple use cases including creating Selenium scripts to help guarantee RPA frameworks.

The most valuable feature is the Element capture. It is capable of scanning the application, recording, and capturing the elements.

You can develop a Selenium script and execute it in Katalon Studio.

There are multiple ways that you can guarantee the functionality of RPA frameworks.

Katalon makes it easy for the automation engineer to create automation scripts.

There are lots of script creation options including for the desktop and the API.

It is easy for a non-technical person to use and adopt.

It is difficult to identify elements on websites that use Angular or ReactJS because they don't have an option to view source code.

There is no centralized repository for documentation, which is something that would assist users.

I have been using Katalon Studio for about a year and a half.

This is a stable solution.

Katalon Studio is scalable because of the cost, and that you can execute Selenium scripts.

We have three people in our team who use it.

My opinion of the technical support is that it is average. I am satisfied with it.

Katalon Studio is a free tool.

Overall, it is a good tool in the market for test automation.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use this solution for user acceptance testing, web testing, regression testing, and mobile app testing.

The most valuable feature is the capability of doing end-to-end testing for both web and mobile apps.

The basic framework and project organization is very good.

Data design testing capabilities are useful.

The maintenance of the tools can be improved.

We have had some issues when it comes to stability i.e when project has lot of items in workspace, which is something that needs to be improved.

I have been using Katalon Studio for just under two years.

At times, Katalon is a little bit non-stable i.e When a project has lot of items in workspace, it takes a while to save . We have had a couple of issues related to instability for more complex models, but we are hoping that it will get better. Because of these issues, we are not able to integrate this solution into our platform.

The scalability is okay for our immediate purposes. We have a maximum of ten users who are all test engineers.

We did have a couple of questions for technical support but we did not have direct interaction with them. Instead, we asked them through the web community forums, and some of them were answered.

It was a difficult problem so that may be why not all of our questions were answered. Also, you don't always get reliable answers from the community. For example, we followed some free advice to help with the implementation and it was not good for that purpose.

Prior to Katalon Studio, we were using UFT for our testing. We switched because Katalon is free and doesn't cost any money. It works in the meantime, and they have the capabilities that we need. The cost was definitely a factor.

The initial setup is really simple, which is one of the good things about this product.

It was really easy to implement and use. I look for information online from Katalon before we started our testing.

We completed the implementation using our in-house team.

It takes two or three people to deploy and maintain this solution.

There is a free version of the tool to use and support is available through the community forums, but there is a licensed version as well.

We did not evaluate other options. We needed certain capabilities and we found Katalon to be acceptable.

It is a good product. I would recommend it because they are promoting that they will update it for free, for life. We have had issues with stability but it might be better with the licensed version.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We evaluated Katalon Studio along with Postman and SoapUI to be part of our testing framework. We used it mainly for microservices, API automation, and testing API endpoints. We click one button to have it run all of the tests and generate a report.

Katalon Studio is useful because it helped us to generate reports to see which test cases passed versus which ones failed. It gives a good graphical representation of the results.

The most important feature is the Jenkins integration; it is pretty straight forward and allows us to run nightly builds.

The integration with Slack is very helpful.

The Katalon Analytical Studio, which is directly integrated, offers better reporting capabilities, which is a good feature.

We found that Katalon Studio crashes a lot of the time and it would be very good if it were more stable. When it crashes, the tests are not always saved and this means that you have to start again from scratch. It would be helpful to have an automatic save feature.

We used Katalon Studio for about two months while we were evaluating different products.

This solution crashes often and stability is something that needs improvement.

I would rate the stability a six and a half out of ten.

Scalability depends on the scope of the project. It is not meant for load testing. However, if it can be integrated then you would see that it's more scalable in that aspect. Because it is just for API endpoint testing, it is not as scalable as one would assume. Again, it is for endpoint testing as opposed to load testing.

We had a team of four or five people who were using this product. They are test engineers with similar roles. 

It is a growing community. There are documents available but I would say that the community is pretty small as compared to what Postman has.

Prior to this solution, we were using TestNG. It is more about writing automation code as opposed to using an automation tool. Using it means that you have to write a lot of code. Code snippets will do for some testing but if you want to do regression testing then there is a lot more to do. One of the reasons that we implemented Postman, and evaluated Katalon Studio, was to get away from writing code and using something more stable.

The initial setup is quite straightforward.

We deploy per release, where every two weeks we deploy a new release.

Our implementation strategy is to create the test case first, then to create a test suite in the object repository. We can add all of the endpoints, and the calls for the endpoints. We run the tests through the suites, which will test all of the test cases. It is then run with the Jenkins integration and Slack integration to get the results, and what has passed or failed will be clear.

The implementation is straightforward if you are using it from the local machine. You can download it directly through the provider interface.

If you are running it through the Jenkins you will require a plugin to be downloaded. Jenkins supports plugins that include the Katalon plugin, and once downloaded, you enter your code into the repository and run it from there.

We were using the free version of this tool.

We evaluated Postman and SoapUI along with Katalon Studio. Ultimately, we chose Postman because it has been in the market for a while, it has good open-source documentation and has a more active community. In general, people trust it.

Products such as this one are a byproduct of artificial intelligence. It comes up with very nice code snippets that we can use, and it is good to see the industry moving forward in this aspect. The future is AI and Katalon is a part of that.

When it comes to testing RESTful APIs, this is a good solution but in the alternative, Postman is out there. That is the one that we ultimately chose to implement.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We have used this tool to automate the regression test suite for our testing environment. In the coming future, we are willing to do the same in staging and production environments.

It definitely improved the organization in terms of time. We are now performing automated testing in 15 minutes, which were previously taking a long time when doing it manually.

We liked the built-in framework. 

Also, I personally like the 'Object Spy' feature of this tool. It makes it easy to find an element on the web page.

Katalon Studio should improve on its supported platforms. It should start working on Silverlight automation as well.

We use Katalon for automating our website. The environment that we use it in is an website build in Node.js.

Previously, we had no automation solution for the web. Therefore, this application has helped a lot in automating the web.

The best feature is the split up between test cases and the test object. This allows us to easily change an error.

Support options need improvement. It is sometimes hard to find a solution to any given problem, thus you are forced to use another solution.

None whatsoever.

None whatsoever.

I did not have a previous solution.

There is no cost for setup or licensing.

I did not evaluate other options.

My advice is when you need a solution for a web automation tool, then use this one.