Pick Katalon if
qA teams who will stay on Free locally or buy a yearly Studio seat.
Read the Katalon pageKatalon vs Playwright
Our take
Pick Katalon if you're on a qA team who will stay on Free locally or buy a yearly Studio seat. Pick Playwright if you're on a team who will stay on the OSS runner at $0 while they open a first Trace Viewer — then add their own CI, not Cypress Cloud Team $67 first unless they want Cypress’s hosted dashboard. Skip Katalon if you're a developer who want code-first Playwright in CI (Playwright).
Best for
Katalon One desktop studio for mixed UI + API tests with a public yearly seat
Playwright A trace you start at a public $
Free plan
Katalon $0 · author and run locally; record & playback; basic web/mobile
Playwright No free plan
Lowest paid
Katalon Professional $1
Playwright Not published by the vendor
Coding agent
Katalon Studio AI agents
Playwright
Runs where
Katalon
Playwright Hosted
Watch out
Katalon Free has no Studio AI agents or parallel suites
Playwright No hosted cloud runner in core
Last checked
Katalon 2026-10-28 · katalon.com/pricing
Playwright 2026-10-23 · playwright.dev
Which one, then?
Pick Playwright if
teams who will stay on the OSS runner at $0 while they open a first Trace Viewer — then add their own CI, not Cypress Cloud Team $67 first unless they want Cypress’s hosted dashboard.
Read the Playwright page