Katalon vs. Playwright

Katalon TestOps is well suited for an oraganization who want to organize their automation collections and have everything in one place. It provides good insight on test runs, failures and also helps in defect tracking. It is extremely easy to schedule and run test suites automatically. With the help of test history, it becomes easier to triage the report and identify if it is a product issue or a test flakiness. Also with the automation run scheduling features with custom options, user do not have to manually trigger the runs and just run the scheduler to do the job.

Incentivized

Playwright is very well suited for any kind of frontend QA regression testing. It's perfect for ensuring that important features that are not often updated remain fully functional across updates or releases. It is not well suited for testing a feature that requires more developer updates before it is ready for end users. Playwright tests are not always simple to maintain if frequent updates are required to keep them relevant. Playwright can be used for API or database assertions as well, but it's not necessarily best suited for those scenarios. It does perform well enough to consider that use case for simplicity if Playwright is already relevant for any frontend QA regression tests that are needed.

Incentivized

• Easy to setup and quick to get started: As Katalon comes with built-in features a new automation tester can automate easily. Script creation time is quick.
• Test Analytics: Katalon also provides analytics which tells you the pattern of your automated tests at a different instance of time.
• Third Party Integration: Katalon provides amazing integration with 3rd party tools like JIRA, ALM, GIT, JENKINS, etc.
• Image-based testing: Katalon also provides inbuilt image based test automation.

Incentivized

• automation
• integrations
• support
• community
• features
• easy to use
• documentation

Incentivized

• Integration with Azure is painstakingly slow as it takes too much time to upload reports to Azure. When raised with the support team i was advised to contact Microsoft who promptly and correctly replied that its an issue with the katalon plugin.
• Non Responsive Customer Support. Several mails were replied late.
• The Desktop app uses too much memory when booting up and running tests even on a 16gb RAM.

• UI
• API
• Performance

Incentivized

Due to the slowness, there is an intermediate timeout. There is no other problem.

Incentivized

I find Playwright very intuitive and generally do not have any trouble using it on a daily basis. However, I do have coworkers with more limited experience in software who have struggled immensely in learning to use Playwright properly. Playwright is very well documented which helps if you plan to use AI to help you write any test automation (which I generally don't recommend, but is an option).

Incentivized

I love the support. They have provided answers and solutions for most of our questions or doubts that could come up. They also have provided basic tutorials on how to get familiarized with the program.

Incentivized

Katalon Studio is above both the tools is due to its codeless test automation feature and having API, desktop, web, and mobile automation in one place but obviously there is room for improvement when desktop automation is of primary importance in the automation.

Incentivized

We selected Playwright over the rest for several reasons. The learning curve is faster, making it easier for our team to get up to speed quickly. The setup is pretty straithtforwared, minimal configurartion needed and a great example included in the configuration which includes all the basics to start writing using that spec as a placeholder. Compared to Cypress, Playwright support multiple browsers out of the box, giving us broader testing coverage. Appium is great for mobile testing, but extremely slow.

Incentivized

• Support can be better: As mentioned before, katlon community is still growing but is currently a small community. If you are stuck, its hard to find help in the community and one has to reach out to the support for help. This takes a while before you can get solution to your problem.
• Result upload takes little longer time: It is been observed that uploading tests results takes little longer.
• Sometimes it gets hard to integrate: Since this is fairly a new tool, requires lot of learning curve to get the job done effectively.

Incentivized

• Usable
• customisable
• extendable

Incentivized