An Update on the Future of Katalon

This is an official update from the Katalon team on our roadmap and future changes.

Dear Katalon Community,

Katalon Studio has been around for three years with the vision to make test automation accessible to everyone. However, we’ve come to a point in which we need financial revenues to continue growing the product.

On that account, starting from version 7.0.0, we are introducing subscription options while still maintaining a free version for individual users:

  • Katalon Studio (KS): free IDE, requires online activation with no limitations on quota.
  • Katalon Studio Enterprise (KSE): paid IDE with exclusive features, basic support, all Katalon plugins, and options to activate offline.
  • Katalon Runtime Engine (RE): paid engine to execute tests in CI/CD infrastructures or via the command-line interface with options to activate offline. Compatible with KS and KSE.

Which Option Works Best for My Team?

Based on our users’ feedback, we’ve come up with a set of product combinations with an affordable cost structure to give you flexible allocation on budget, licensing, and scalability.

  • Individuals: Generate and run automated tests on KS.
  • Small teams: Combine KS and RE to leverage Katalon as a cost-competitive solution.
  • Medium and large teams: Combine KSE and RE for projects at scale and to comply with enterprise security policies.

Katalon Studio 7 vs. 6.x

KS7 includes many major updates: Desktop testing, Smart Wait, and other performance and functional enhancements. The KS 6.x version is still available to download and activate until April 30, 2020 (6 months from now) for current users. However, there will be no maintenance, support, or bug fixes for this version from now till its sunset. We believe this period is sufficient for our current users to continue their operation without sudden interruption and/or consider making necessary moves.

Our team understands that this transition may cause inconvenience to your work. While our efforts to make Katalon accessible are still ongoing and won’t be perfect, we believe this is the optimal middle ground. Once again, thank you for choosing Katalon.

Sincerely,

Katalon Team

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I’ve probably been watching/reading to much about Brexit, but… I commend this statement to the House community.

Seriously, I think this provides clarity and openness where once there was conjecture and confusion. Now we can strategize and plan for the future.

Excellent.

Thank you team. :sunglasses:

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Please dont bring up Brexit on here :sweat_smile: I thought i could escape the disaster at work :rofl:

That being said - i totally agree with Russ, this is the post the community has been waiting for. Thanks Team :slight_smile:

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Does the existance of the RE imply that running test suites from command line will not be possible with the free edition the way it is now, or am I simply misunderstanding something?

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Hi @christopher.berger

Yes, the Katalon Runtime Engine (RE) is required for console execution. You can use RE along with free Katalon Studio at an affordable price.

The following documentations provide information and how to use RE:

Is KS 6.x version the same?

Yes, 6.x versions are unchanged.

@xuxiaopuzi
but take note, it will be deactivated on April 2020.
and once stable 7.x is released, 6.x won’t receive updates anymore.
so, plan your migration accordingly, you have decent amount of time to do it

Thank you also for the announcement and transparency.
After 2.5 years of Katalon usage my personal logic and feedback is this:

  1. Katalon work is tremendously large volume, quite complex and overall well executed. It has helped us greatly in fast initiation of automation solutions for web or mobile apps. I respect the large volume of features and struggle of the team, and I approve that this kind of effort cannot be sustained by it’s owner alone free forever.

  2. Katalon is a MIRACLE solution for a free tool. I also can only remember the major stability issues I personally discovered and announced (security, regression) and absolute lack of feedback on important topics. This may be natural for the insane development sustained pace. I am sure this instability is exactly why there is a need for financing support, to help the solution stabilize, grow and really remain to stay in the QA world. But stability proof is still needed, and I know for sure Katalon team is already aware of this. As we all are in our line of work.

For the announced prices, we definitely need to consider both observed points and decide on the future.
(A couple of weeks ago the notion of discounts for existing users was thrown, I guess there is no such thing in the final announcement.)

I wish all the best evolution to Katalon, since it has and may continue be our evolution as well, together.
It’s a free world for all of us, and meritocracy is what should win at the end of the day.

Friendly,
Cornel

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@devalex88 Is there still going to be discount pricing for current users?

@Don_Welsh i don’t think @devalex88 is entitled to answer on this matter, but the product owner.
check your email registered with katalon account.
at least for me, received some promises …

Thanks @Ibus! No email from Katalon yet, but I will keep an eye out for one.

@Don_Welsh make sure is not landed in ‘spam’.
i am confident the team will keep the words

hi Katalon team,

thanks for the information. Is there any discount for existing users?

@aukse.zirgule did you read the two previous posts?

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Okay. I guess lots of free things don’t last forever. Many years ago, Toad (now Toad for Oracle) used to be free for anyone to use. One day my former employer decided to invite the creator of Toad from the East Coast to come over and talk. The next thing we knew is that the guy was handed an offer he could not resist (over $6 million) and went home very happy. Not very long after that, Toad is no longer free.

Our current workflow is to use jenkins to spin up (many) katalon containers to run tests concurrently based on cucumber tags.

Will the Runtime Engine licensing continue to support this workflow?
Will we need (many) Runtime Engine licenses to support high-load concurrent testing?
If I understand correctly, the license will be tied to a machine. How will the licensing work for containers and/or virtual machines?

Thanks in advance,

Corey

Firstly thanks for the lovely tool,

@ThanhTo @devalex88 Hope the free version of Katalon support the above said features, I mean at-least free one’s, performance related issue’s, bug fixes …etc. ?

image

Hope the Build CMD, will continue to be available in the free version of Katalon except for the fact that, I have to supply the API key.

The reference “KS” is to Katalon Studio (version 7). That is the free offering.

The reference “KSE” (also at version 7) is the pay version.

Reference Full Name Current Version Pay?
KS Katalon Studio 7 No, it’s FREE
KSE Katalon Studio Enterprise 7 Yes
KRE Katalon Runtime Engine (CLI) 7 Yes
1 Like