What Is Katalon?
What Is Katalon?
Katalon was developed by Katalon Inc. and is a low-code Automated Testing Software Solution that is built on the open-source frameworks Selenium and Appium; it has a specialised IDE interface for Web, API, Desktop and Mobile Applications. It works on Linux, Windows (7,8,10) and MacOS (10, 11) and Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Safari, Internet Explorer and Headless browsers. It has dual scripting interfaces for testers with different programming skills and can be used by people with no programming skills, who use a simple interface that does not require the writing of code. More proficient testers can use scripting with code suggestion, syntax highlighting and debugging.
Is It Better Than Selenium
It is often faster than Selenium, one reason is that the scripting language is Groovy, and as it is built on Java, there are more libraries and test objects. If the test is very long, the difference in performance and speed can be noticeable. It also has a wider set of integrations compared to Selenium and is easy to deploy. Unlike Selenium, Katalon Studio can test API’s without additional integrations. There is also a Katalon store, where users and developers can access 3 groups of a variety of plugins, Utilities, Integrations and Custom Keywords.
Katalon Recorder
This was first released in January 2015 and is a Selenium IDE-compatible playback and record tool used in automated browser testing. It allows the user to record, debug, manage test cases. Test suites are exported to various programming languages, e.g. Java, Ruby, Python, Groovy, C# and Robot Framework. The record and playback features are for testers who do not have programming skills.
What Is Playwright?
Playwright is a headless browser automation platform, similar in part to Puppeteer. It can target several browsers including Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge. Developed and maintained by Microsoft, Playwright is a test automation framework that allows the user to perform comprehensive automated testing directly on major browsers. This tool is designed with multiple features such as an auto-wait option, capturing of test trace, flexibility and perhaps most importantly cross platform and support for several coding languages. Playwright is one of the few test frameworks that can use other languages as well as JavaScript / Typescript. Test cases can be written in .Net, Java, TypeScript and Python, and it runs cross platform on Windows, Mac and Linux.
What is Protractor?
Most importantly Protractor has been abandoned by its maintainers and is end of life Summer 2023. Given its 8.8k stars on Github and its heavy usage by certain parts of the Angular community, it is still worth understanding. Protractor is an opensource end to end testing automation tool built by Google, for Angular and AngularJS applications. Although it might be expected that the tool can only be used for Angular applications, it can also be used for non-Angular applications. The testing is automated on an actual browser.
What Is Puppeteer?
Puppeteer was originally created by the Chrome/Google development team, Puppeteer automates Chromium based browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave and even Firefox). It runs in both headless and interactive mode. Headless being the default, it runs the browser emulation without needing to render it to screen.
With a massive 79.8k stars at the time of writing, this is one of the most popular libraries on Github, and is used by many organisations for many purposes ranging from test, to gathering information for several purposes. Adappt used this in 2020 to gather Covid stats from each govt for the World Health Organization.
The real power of Puppeteer is that it will faithfully render pages in the same way as Chrome / Edge, using the very latest release of the Chromium engine and all whilst running in headless mode. This makes it perfect for integration into CI/CD pipelines running on servers without GPUs
Puppeteer can be used for automated browser testing. It is fast and robust and has a ‘clean syntax’ that allows the user to write readable tests.
