Uindow vs. Katalon Studio
A whole QA suite to fill in a form? Hard pass.
Katalon is a big enterprise QA platform built, for the web, on Selenium/WebDriver. If you manage a cross-platform test estate, fine. But for everyday web chores you just want a recorder, a results screen, and a browser that acts human - not a workbench, a grid, and a license negotiation.
All the chore-doing, none of the QA weight
Human-grade input and a results screen - free, local, and yours, not an enterprise platform you rent.
Uindow
Katalon Studio
Results you can actually use
Katalon's TestOps gives you dashboards and analytics for a test estate. Uindow's results screen keeps the output of each chore: the files it downloads, plus screenshots, full video, structured tables, and detailed logs - all searchable, filterable, and exportable as real files on your machine.
Trusted events, every time
- Uindow drives Chromium directly and sends trusted, OS-level events, so native dialogs, file pickers, dropdowns, and hover states simply behave.
- For the web, Katalon runs on Selenium/WebDriver, which issues synthetic events that modern sites can tell apart from a person.
Full video of every run
Recording runs in a separate worker, so it never drops a frame - not during page loads, reloads, or failures. Katalon can capture screenshots and video for tests; Uindow ties recordings to a results vault you keep for every run.
A recorder that writes it for you
Katalon offers record-and-playback on top of WebDriver. Uindow's recorder is built in and writes clean, deterministic JavaScript as you click - no project setup, no license.
Waits for you when it matters
Some steps need a person: a login, a captcha, a one-time code. Uindow pauses mid-run, asks you to step in, and picks up exactly where it left off - so a single wall doesn't sink the whole automation.
State that carries between runs
Each runner gets a persistent global store that remembers values from one run to the next, plus a run-level store that resets cleanly every time - both readable and writable from your modules.
Inputs kept out of your code
A module's inputs - logins, files, anything sensitive - live separately from its source. Hand someone the automation and nothing secret comes with it, and you decide exactly which files each run may touch.
Modules you can read and share
Automations are portable
.js.yaml modules: genuinely human-readable, easy to diff and debug, and yours to keep private or publish for everyone - not locked inside a proprietary project format.Private by default
Uindow runs entirely on your machine; your credentials, tokens, and the sites you automate never leave it. Katalon leans on grids and TestOps cloud - with Uindow, local and private is simply the default.
CLI and MCP, built in
Katalon has a CLI runner for CI. Uindow ships a CLI and an MCP server in the app, so any AI agent can drive a real, human-grade browser - something a QA workbench doesn't do.
A local, private LLM
Need a model to summarize or classify mid-run? Call a small LLM running right on your machine: private, offline, and zero cost per step.
The best selectors, open-sourced
Stop hand-writing brittle selectors. Explore any page inside Uindow and get the single best CSS selector in one click - no DevTools. Our engine treats selection as a search problem, ranks every candidate, and emits readable compound selectors with fallbacks already computed. We open-sourced the whole thing as @uindow/css.
Built for humans, not hackers
Uindow isn't for anti-bot obsessives. It's for teachers, office workers, and anyone stuck clicking through a site that refuses to release an API. Ease of use, privacy, and peace of mind come first - the realism is just a happy bonus.
Loved by the people behind these products