UPDATED (October 22) - Katalon Studio/Enterprise 7.0 Interim Announcement

You lost a lot of trust with quota on free version. Glad to see you have removed it for now, how long will that last? :money_mouth_face: Probably after few months, quota will silently come back for sure :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

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No doubt … Katalon Studio is an awesome tool. Hats off @Katalon_team team

@abhishek.snitches199 … I too have a similar experience.

After recommending this tool to my Manager, he asked these two simple questions; Why free and how long? I showed him the below Katalon documentation to persuade him. But my manager agreed to use Katalon half-heartedly. I guess he foresee, what would happen next.

Now I have more than 400 TC with 8-9 profile. I am totally shocked to see the proceeding of Katalon.

I am quiet confused what to do now. I am in a deadly situation now, not sure how to face my Manage.

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The initial thread made me very nervous for our future with Katalon Studio, but these are all good changes. I’m glad the Katalon Team are listening to feedback.

I look forward to the official announcement soon.

EDIT: Another concern I have is the free versions requirement for online activation, as this is not an option for me in the environment I work in. I hope the current thinking around this requirement is changed.

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We all know its a good tool & everything is in one place. But, putting someone in bad state after advertising its free is horrible .Its really bad agenda to add restriction on profile & test cases. When you already said its free in the beginning & now applied the constraint. I feel like its a downfall for the Katalon. The way Selenium eat up Mercury. Definitely some one who hampered by this restriction badly come in the Market with open source tool.

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Hello my fellow automation pioneers,

TLDR: I love Katalon Studio. I dunno how I feel about the enterprise version of it. Thank you to the community. What are your thoughts?

This will probably be a sappy post, but I’d love feedback and input on this. I’ll preface with this is just my story and my opinion. I’d appreciate your time to read.

I started working on automated testing about a couple years ago now and it’s been a great journey so far. I started as a manual QA tester now three years ago and was given the go-ahead to start looking into better solutions, specifically automated ones. This was my time to shine as I had a college career in software engineering. I looked into a few tools for this purpose, most notably the SmartBear products. The cost of these software packages where certainly overwhelming, coming from a company that is very tight on budgets. It was looking pretty bleak until I came across the tool we are all here for, Katalon Studio. This was around maybe late 2017/early 2018 when Katalon was in a very early state, the community was relatively small, and this forum was also in a very early state. I have been able to see Katalon improve so much over the past couple years, and see people of the community really come together to help each other out. I’m sure we all share that little excitement when we see posts from the Katalon developers that tell us “This new thing will be available in X release”. If it wasn’t for Katalon Studio being free, I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today.

I loved it, and I was really excited to be part of a new community and application that seriously was blowing my mind. I have been given the opportunity to do some really cool stuff at my company. I can happily say that I lead a small QA team in automation efforts and helping them get rid of all the boring manual QA they do day-to-day. It has even gone as far as creating a sustainable and modular automation framework for them to use on the 100-200+ web apps the company builds throughout the year. It has been an incredible benefit to both my team and myself to have such a tool to use. Now that it has been proven to be an incredible asset to the company, other departments are looking for ways to make their processes even better with the use of automation. it has really flourished here and although it may seem silly, it really makes me happy to see people get excited about this stuff.

In regards to the upcoming release, I find it bittersweet. I’m glad I get to keep doing what I’m doing in regards to pressing on with automation efforts. I can only imagine I’ll still be lurking and helping out where I can in the community. I do understand that business need to make money, so I see where KMS (my assumption, the parent company of Katalon Studio) are coming from when making another paid version (Katalon Studio Enterprise) of the tool we know and love. I am still a little concerned however because of the split versions. I’m the type of person that loves new stuff and toys to play with in software applications. I’ll make a correspondence to video games for this next part. As an avid player of video games I have been seeing things like this for awhile now. You get a game from $0-$60 and then there are pay walls for more things, all the fun stuff. The extra goodies and things you get to have but only if you pay for them. Again in a sense I get it, people want to get paid for what they do and the efforts they make. The problem arises where these sorts of business models become more common or more important then the people that it’s for. If anybody is an active player then you’ll know what I mean when I mention micro-transactions or even paid DLC. There are companies out there that are taking advantage of this and giving us 1/2 a game for full price and then selling the rest in 15-30 dollar expansions. It really sucks!

My main concern here is what things are going to be held back on the “freemium” version of KS or even down the line what things will be pulled from it. I have already seen this in the form of TestRail and JIRA integrations/plugins. These used to be part of KS but were later pulled into a paid plugin. As I look at the “enterprise advanced features” grid, I fear that these things will not be able to be used anymore unless I break down the pay wall so to speak. Unfortunately I’m at the will of my company and I’m going to be missing out which makes me a bit upset. I hope it never comes to a point where I’m unable to continue my work because of features being pulled. It really is a battle to get certain things where I currently am, and I’m not looking forward to trying to battle again over such an important tool.

In closing, I just want to thank all those who have helped me in the community here, it really means a lot. May we never stop learning, discovering, and helping with our own automation efforts. We’re all from different disciplines, companies, and what have you, but we all share a common goal here and that’s just great. If you did end up reading my whole post here today, I really appreciate your time.

What are you’re experiences with Katalon Studio?
How do you feel about the new release of V7/KSE?
Do you have any concerns about the different versions?

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Hi. I just want to add that both Test Case and Profile quotas are removed.

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I hope everyone agrees that this topic has served its purpose and that leaving it open for yet more people to add essentially the same feedback serves little to add to that purpose.

In the light of the latest info provided by @devalex88, I am closing this topic for the time being preferring to wait for the final announcement from Katalon Team and management.

I will update the head topic as soon as there is any further official feedback or announcement(s).

Thanks everyone.

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Did I understand that correct from https://docs.katalon.com/katalon-studio/docs/activate-RE.html that when I want to run my testsuites over command line I have to pay for the KS Runtime Engine?

So in future I’m not able to use KS with my jenkins task management system?

If that’s correct, it would be very sad for me. I had a real great time with KS in the past, but I don’t think I could handle my test environment with the free version anymore or I get stuck on the 6.3.3 version, where I have the functionality I need.

Thanks
Andreas

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From what I gather, if you want to run test suites using CLI, you will need to acquire the KRE license as of version 7 and onward. I’m also having a bit of a struggle with this as I have multiple regressions scheduled using CLI overnight and what have you.

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It looks like Katalon is moving with full throttle into whole licensing business model like other vendors. I wish good luck to Katalon and hope it can provide discounts to the users who are using this tool and have been supported Katalon on its journey with Technical and business help.

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@Vijay_Singh Please see this post, Katalon is offering discount to current users

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@Vijay_Singh katalon is moving full throtle to be a sustenable project. and since skilled devs working for free are hard to find … therefore the monetizing plan. so … this is it.

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Thanks Manpreet this is only discussion not information.

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I am with you and it is really important for any business to earn profit and Katalon has to do so. I think this is right approach for KTS team but do not take away free tool and its capabilities.

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@Vijay_Singh I think running CI/CD should be a free option not paid option. Currently RE is node locked which means if you have one 2 servers where you want to run test at same time then you need to pay for 2 RE licenses which will be very difficult to sell it to management. My understanding might be wrong but this is what I think. But I also understand Katalon team cannot keep building this product for free.

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@manpreet.mukkar,Lets hope we will have better and clear picture in future.

In my opinion, monetizing the RE is really a good middle ground for the Katalon dev/business team. I think everyone can agree that KS is a great tool, and that’s no accident: the dev’s have worked their tails off and have listened to community feedback better than most others in the industry. So of course, they deserve to be compensated for that.

Removal of the script/profile quotas was a good move for them. I think that was seen by many as a very clear pay wall, and one that most individual users could not justify paying for.

On the other hand, having the RE be paid software makes sense, because running from CI/CD is primarily a feature that enterprise-level users would utilize, and thus is fair game (IMO) to monetize over functionality that the average, individual user would care about.

Just my 2 cents.

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in addition to what is already expressed … do not forget that maintaining valuable servers for serving implied services, e.g. the download, forum, analytics cost money.
so no matter how someone is willing to give a tool for free (even opensourced) to offer it without end-user frustration do cost. a lot.
dev/product owner frustration because lack of bandwith, need to scale, need more automated test on the build stage,handle the issues prioritise them …

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should i mention also that somebody have to write the docs too? and keep it updated?
and skilled techwriters are even more difficult to find than skilled programers … just saying …

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Katalon is undoubtedly a unique automation solution. Its e-co system (Studio, TestOps, etc…) provides team abilities to develop scripts faster and scale executions further, and that is nearly a development requirement nowadays to get the test results fast and reliable.

That being said, I can see why it’s being monetized to supplement the funds and motivations for Katalon developers behind the screen to continue delivering cool features/improvements to achieve automation goals efficiently. Testing is a huge ocean, once you go wrong it will sink you down no matter what, and the efforts to revert the sinks might not be acceptable in many teams.

Working with automation tests is a joy but also a pain without having the right solution. You are assigned to do automation for this website, this mobile application, or just this APIs collection and you’ve found an immediate tool to let you complete that quickly. That’s fine until one day you are not developing the test scripts alone, or the managers tell you to scale executions on cloud, or on different machines, or on contained Docker. You try to see again is my current tool support, if not then I have to develop it myself? What about the current test scripts? Should I migrate them too?

Over the time, this is the most exhausting brain leakage I’ve observed, and Katalon does provide a solution to adapt it all with the best among other solutions I’ve tried. I think they see it’s the time to let this model go live after many considerations and concerns.

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