When it comes to automation testing, Katalon and Cypress are among the most loved choices. Prized for their simplicity, ease of use, and powerful capabilities, they are both a great choice for any teams wanting to improve their testing efficiency. However, Katalon and Cypress have their own unique strengths that fit specific testing needs.
If you are considering which tool to choose for your team, read on. In this review, we will compare Katalon vs Cypress in-depth, providing you with key features of both, and why it is suitable for a certain testing need over another.
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Katalon Platform is a comprehensive software testing platform that enables teams of all sizes to create, manage, execute, and view reports for tests across web, desktop, mobile, and API. That is why it is called a ‘platform’, as Katalon can really help you test on such a rich array of environments, while also giving you robust features supporting all stages of the software testing life cycle. What’s better is that Katalon provides unique AI-powered features that can really supercharge your testing.
The power of Katalon comes from the fact that it is several single-point commercial automation testing tools unified into one, carrying all of the features that your team potentially need. Many testing tools on the market can only test for a specific type of application, or support only a few stages of the testing process.
Katalon really paved the way by unifying all of them into one single platform.
After all, testing is a streamlined process with interconnected steps. You need to bring insights from planning into test creation, then update test cases into your test management system, before executing tests and updating their results in your database. You need a tool to connect all stages together.
Katalon Platform gives you all you need. There is no need to find another single-point tool. There is also no need to integrate dozens of single-point tools together. You have everything in one place.
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Let’s see how the Katalon portfolio together gives you such a comprehensive testing experience.
To start testing with Katalon, you first need to download Katalon Studio. Katalon Studio is a productive IDE to create automated tests on web, desktop, mobile, and API. It offers both manual and scripting mode for all testing needs. In the manual mode, you can simply choose the keywords for the corresponding action you want to perform. As you can see in the image below, we have Click, Set Text, and Verify Element Present keywords.
At its core, these keywords are just abstractions of code snippets, and you can easily switch to the Scripting mode to see and edit the underlying code - whatever ways you want!
Katalon Studio also has a Record-and-Playback utility which allows you to record a set of actions on a browser. Perform all the manual test steps as you normally do, and Katalon should capture all of the test objects then turn the action sequence into test code that you can easily execute across environments.
Katalon Studio is also where you can execute your test cases. Once you have successfully built your test cases, simply click the Run button on the top bar and select an environment to run on.
You can run tests locally, remotely, and even on-cloud. For on-cloud test execution, you can leverage Katalon TestCloud, which gives you access to a rich array to test environments to run your tests on.
You can easily group those test cases into test suites and test suites into test collections for better organization. Katalon TestOps is where that happens. As you can see here, our test suite only has 1 test case, and you can view the Path, test run statuses, and the number of passes/fails it has.
As you execute tests, your results should be sent back to Katalon TestOps, where they will be visualized into easy-to-digest graphs and charts. There are 7 reports in TestOps, including:
Not just that, Katalon Platform also supports a wide variety of integrations, so that it can seamlessly fit into any techstack and CI/CD pipeline you are currently using. Collaboration integrations (Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc.) are also supported so you can easily share insights and align stakeholders on testing activities.
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Cypress is a JavaScript end-to-end testing framework for web applications. It addresses well the pain point that QAs and developers face when testing websites. With Cypress, you can set up, write, run, and debug web tests at ease thanks to the relatively simple syntax and core features that make testing almost as effortless as writing an instruction in human-readable language.
The underlying mechanism of Cypress drastically differs from Selenium, and that is also one of its strong points:
Read More: Katalon vs Selenium: A Complete Guide
This inherent difference is what makes Cypress stand out. It has native access to every single object of your web application. Whatever your application has, Cypress can access and test on them. This provides a high level of flexibility and room for customization.
Key strengths of Cypress are for end-to-end testing and component testing (or unit testing). Cypress is highly useful when you want to test while developing your application, making it a strong framework to have if you want to follow the TDD approach.
Here are some of the notable features that Cypress gives you as a testing framework:
Katalon is a more comprehensive choice than Cypress. As a low-code tool, Katalon enables even non-technical people to easily test any web/desktop/mobile applications, and even APIs. Cypress is great for developers who want to test as they code, and want a framework that offers a decent number of features.
Note that the final choice of whether you should use Cypress or Katalon depends on whether you want to build or buy.
Build is when you choose a framework (Cypress in our case) to write tests all by yourself, which actually requires testers to have strong proficiency in understanding the building blocks of framework development to build a reliable engine.
On the other hand, buy is when you choose a tool (Katalon in this case) to build test cases more quickly thanks to all of the ready-to-use features.
So, to build or not to build? Have a look at the table below to understand the difference between the two approaches.
Aspect | Build | Buy |
Installation and Setup | Configure the project with libraries and dependencies. | Download the test automation IDE (e.g., Katalon Studio) and upload existing tests for a quick start. |
Create Tests | Script using a programming language and IDE of choice. | Utilize low-code options such as record-and-playback or drag-and-drop from a keyword library. |
Run Tests | Set up for web servers, databases, and test environment integrations. | Little-to-no setup required for local, CI, cloud, or external test environments. No additional setup needed for parallel execution. |
Test Reporting & Analytics | Configure with third-party plugins like Extent Reports and Allure. | Built-in reporting with options to export results to HTML, CSV, and JUnit reports locally. Integrations with Jira and other test management tools for syncing execution results. Defect management with test traceability. |
Manage | Define the test hierarchy with design patterns like Page Object Model and Data-Driven Testing. | Already implemented popular patterns for script and test code reusability, including Object Repositories, BDD (Cucumber), data-driven testing, and keyword-driven testing.
Read More: Guide To Do Data-driven Testing With Katalon |
Extensibility & Customization | Open source allows complete freedom in building features and integrations. | Pre-built frameworks may have limitations, but options for added capabilities depend on the chosen plan (Free or Paid) with corresponding support. |
Supported Application Types | Libraries are often dedicated to specific application types, requiring learning and building multiple frameworks. | Leading vendors emphasize an "all-in-one" approach, centralizing automation activities and reducing the learning curve for various application types. |
With the comparison above, the answer is already pretty clear whether you should go for Katalon or Cypress.
Go with Katalon if you want to just start testing and leverage all of the powerful features it offers. Katalon gives you a productive IDE, ready-to-use test design patterns, frameworks (data-driven testing, keyword-driven testing, etc.), and even test report features that would otherwise have required a plugin. No infrastructure maintenance required. The great thing is that Katalon is highly scalable, so even individuals can also enjoy the powerful features of Katalon for their testing needs.
Go with Cypress if you want an open-source, supporting primarily web application testing. It is a good choice for advanced users who want a great degree of customization.
To install Katalon, simply visit the Download page and choose the suitable version. Regarding the pricing plans, Katalon offers a Free Forever version for you to get started. The Premium plan gives you full access to the Katalon portfolio, and there is also an Ultimate plan for custom pricing and advanced configuration.
Katalon Studio is an IDE for test automation designed for both beginners and experienced testers to create and execute automated tests for web, desktop, mobile, API.
Katalon TestOps is a web-based test orchestration and analytics platform designed to help teams manage and monitor their test automation processes centrally.
Katalon TestCloud allows testers to execute Katalon Studio tests on a wide range of devices and browsers in parallel. Read more about Katalon TestCloud.
You can easily visit the Katalon Docs to learn everything you need to use the Katalon Platform. If you want to have a more visualized version with step-by-step tutorials, go to Katalon Academy and enroll in some free courses to get started.