Katalon staff saying Katalon Studio is staying free forever isn’t 100% true. For example JIRA integration is originally included in the base Katalon Studio. But is being deprecated in the next major release. And now you have to pay for a plugin to get JIRA integration.
When I asked about this Katalon responded to this basically saying:
It requires considerable investment from us to support the compatibility with different JIRA versions and deployment models.
You can also find new features developed with the plugin to make it one of the best automated test integration with JIRA available today to justify the price.
They also are offering a 50% discount
While that may justify the price and a discount is nice, that doesn’t take away the fact they removed a feature and now charge for it. So it is not always staying 100% free forever.
Another user complained about this in the Katalon store section saying:
Hi,
If I understand, the goal of this payable plugin is to replace a free feature of Katalon Studio.
I chose Katalon Studio because the features I needed were free. If I have to pay for something free, I will find an other solution.
50% discount can’t replace something free.
What will be the next payable plugin ? Object library ? Git integration ? Katalon reports ? Create test case ? Record web ?
I’m not saying this is right or wrong for them to do as it’s their product and it is not Open Source. So just keep that in mind to determine if you want to use the product and it truly remaining 100% free is important to you.
No matter what they keep saying they could start charging for Katalon Studio and you will have to re-do your work using something else. And maybe your company will not be happy with you for selecting Katalon Studio.
Even the Katalon CEO VU Lam says on this site: So be confident that you can use Katalon Studio now and into the foreseeable future—for free.
Foreseeable future does not mean forever!
If they truly want to remove this fear, they should make Katalon Studio Open Source. Or at the least, they could add a built in feature or a plugin to export your Katalon Studio test cases out to generic frameworks such as Java, JUnit and WebDriver and C#, NUnit and WebDriver.
This was brought up as a feature request in a post starting back in Nov 2017. and has many +1’s for this feature to be added.
If they added this feature, that would remove most of the fear this question brings up about Katalon Studio remaining (or not remaining) free.
Hopefully they will add this feature soon, but it has already been over a year.
Just some food for thought that we need to think about when weighing the risks of using this excellent tool or not.