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

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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We are a small company and very very new to test automation. I just had a few weeks this year to try to design some test cases.

I really can understand that KS-Team want and need to earn money to build such a very cool tool.

What my problem is how they did the transfer from freeware to a buying model. It wouldn’t be a problem for me if the old feature would last in the KS version and new features like desktop testing or other new cool stuff is only available in the KSE version.

But so, when you build up many test cases and suites and you use advanced KS-techniques now you have to change to the KSE version. For me I will continue using the KS 6.3.3 version so long it can be used and maybe in future we will change to KSE 7,8 or any other version of it.

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To be honest, the documentation is often written by the community who usually provide better answers. There are better ways for monetizing software than blocking key-features with a overpriced monthly fee. (Think advertisements, donations, affiliates etc.)’

I personally find it a really sly way how the Katalon team is handling it.

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I fully agree that removing some of the basic features to paid version was a bad move. We use debug a lot to help in writing and maintaining keywords to handle Dynamics CRM pages and flows. Now with debug a paid feature, this has caused management to review decision to allow us to use Katalon over their previously approved tool UFT, a tool that is so inflexible and super expensive.

Put it this way. If I was a group just starting out in looking at tools, and I get Katalon free to try it out by recording and then trying to play back tests and they fail, with no way to find out why except logs I would reject Katalon.

Now we have to review other tools to see what we should do moving forward. I lean towards Groovy+Geb+Spock now, since it will allow me to migrate my keywords.

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A post was split to a new topic: How do I evaluate KS7 Free Version?