Encouragement: They need a sweetener, a loss-leader. That’s the free version. Without it, new signups would take a nose-dive overnight.
Safety: Don’t hold your breath (see my previous answer).
Aside: I have an idea for a new product offering which would incorporate KRE. I’m still thinking it through so no details yet (at least not until I get some feedback from Katalon management). What it would do is alleviate some of the stress points around the KRE licensing model.
But don’t hold your breath. If it happens at all, which is unlikely at this point, it won’t be quick.
@mikis-woehrmann now seriously.
if you and your team are smart enogh … can use katalon for free.
and if you are clever, you dont need katalon at all.
just saying.
If you are depending on a tool that you can’t control, like out in the cloud, or with a license that expires, there will always be a chance it won’t be around in the future. Even if you have complete control of the tool, some OS patch etc. will eventually make it stop working.
But test automation is software, and this is an old problem.
Keeping with the riff of “if you are smart enough”, don’t tie your test code any closer to a test framework’s implementation than you have to. For example, you can create abstraction layers between your test code and the underlying framework …as well as using other software design patterns that make maintenance and porting code easier.
If you are familiar with BDD test automation: well written Gherkin code should be independent of the system under test’s implementation. Along the same lines, it can be independent of the test framework. The lower layers take care of the details.
The risk is always there, so keep it in mind when you are designing your test code.
With automation team strength of 4 we have been using this tool for more than two years. For API, Web with data driven testing , CLI… etc. We are in matured state WRT automating our project… but all our efforts are in vain now.
What NEXT :
Firstly … Let’s get out of the emotional attachment that we all have with this tool. There is no point complaining now, since it fall on deaf ears.
Also, my team doesn’t have budget / trust to buy this tool. It’s time to either: Do or Die …
There are two types of pain, one that hurts you and the other that changes you.
I have composed myself. Yeah it definitely require courage,patience and time, especially when someone you trusted shamed you. I found out an open source alternative (Robot Framework), which I am working on and I am happy with it. Definitely it would takes some time to shape up.
That’s OK. Definitely the goodwill, that I once had with Katalon is lost.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Good bye Katalon.
Trust takes years to build seconds to break and forever to repair.
yeah, robot framework is a nice toy (and funny fact, generated reports looks veeery familiar for an katalon user )
or, if java/groovy approach is preferred, one can try a combination of groovy+spock+geb. and with the power of gradle you can unleash a beast.
there are plenty options ‘in the wild’ so it only depends of the team determination to stay with katalon or to migrate to another tool … or combine them.
e.g speaking for myself i found the spy feature uber-cute to quickly generate locators …which i can use them further with any other framework.
and usualy i never use a single product in my daily activity, my working station it ‘bloated’ with various ide’s, tools and so on.
some opensourced, some just free, some paid (by the company, ofcourse).
so … use your imagination, if you are clever nothing can stop you.
LE. i knew this day will came, so … since on year ago i prepared for myself an template project with spock which mimics the usage of GlobalVariables … so if i have to migrate my katalon code will be just a matter of copy-paste and edit some imports.
(and if i add also an xml parser i can even reuse the existing profiles, but such implementation is trivial).
custom keywords will work as they are (or with minor tweaking)
unfortunately i moved to another company where i use different technologies … but i still have my templates in my private git. to be there …
@mikis-woehrmann i hope this brings more light on what i mean by ‘clever’. was no intention to offend anybody
@devalex88, shouldn’t this stay pinned for a while? It’s clearly an important topic for the community. I understand it’s not exactly going Katalon’s intended direction, but still.
“They remove the multiple test data in the free version. booooooo”
I’m not sure I understand this completely… multiple types, like database and Excel in same project? Or multiple excel files as well (ie same type, just more than one of them)?
Sadly the “Future of Katalon” for me is to no longer use it. My company no longer trusts Katalon and will not pay for the tool (or want me to use the free tool either). Luckily I had predicted this pay model change was coming months before v7 was even announced and have an exit strategy.
I wanted to thank the community for the help they have given me in the past. This has been a wonderful community and is the reason Katalon Studio is as popular as it got.
@Jon_West what is sad to hear from you … is the good bye.
why?
you can simply move to another tool but keep in the contact with the katalon comunity.
speaking for myself i am not an active user of this product since more than a year.
but this should not stop me to share ideas with the people here … and if possible give a bit of help here and there.
the comunity stays open
LE. believe it or not, i learned a lot here. even from ‘stupid questions’. just saying
The Git feature might be a “paid” feature as well. Look what happened to integration with JIRA (although you can create your own API scripts to make this work), BASIC Reporting (although free, but now a plug-in - btw plug-ins wouldn’t work on companies with strict proxies), CLI, etc.
I believe they have a new CEO so they might have some re-structuring within the company and re-direction on the profitability of the product.
But as someone said here, somehow you need to “move on” as Katalon team is 90% unlikely to revert back (although it seems it is creating a bit of negative press).
As such, I am now moving on and just like that, putting all the years of scripting and building a comprehensive framework into waste. On the bright side, this might be a nice excuse for me to start learning CYPRESS.
I am not really sure which Customer feedback did they get this from as I am sure I did not receive any emails on it.
A runtime engine that use to run CLI test need to be charge for 49/month is a huge cost for middle and individual company. CLI mode is a necessary and a must thing for automation and now you guys make a charge in just way, hope @Katalon_team do consider as we do push a lot efforts to build up the automation team in my company and it might bring up to permanently close off my team since I had put a lot efforts to convince management team to use Katalon as automation tool due to it provide a well done and free solution to cover the automation testing.
I depend allot on Data Driven tests, I also need to run in CI ENV, so I need the Runtime and enterprise…I can see my company paying $100 a month, but based on the new licensing I saw, we would need to pay a few $100 a month. This is a high expense for a small company. After around 3 years of using Katalon, I think I need to move on…I need a tool that can do CI and DataDriven and is non-coder friendly with ability to add sophisticated code. Don’t mind paying money, as long as they are honest up front.
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