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Catcher vs Maced AI

Bottom line

Catcher is free, while Maced AI is paid. Catcher is open source and Maced AI is not.

Which one should you try?

Catcher

Free

Best for Teams wanting AI test automation without SaaS lock-in

Maced AI

Paid

Best for Engineering teams seeking continuous automated security validation

Pricing, capabilities and platforms side by side. Prices are as of the "Pricing checked" date in the table.

Catcher

Catcher

You describe tests in plain English, and Catcher's LLM-powered planner executes them in a real browser — no script authoring, no Selenium boilerplate. The vision-based fallback handles dynamic UIs where element selectors break, which is where most scripted test frameworks quietly start failing your CI. Because you supply the API key directly, LLM costs land on your own account — nothing is proxied through a vendor margin. The ceiling arrives when you need a test management dashboard, CI pipeline integrations, or a shared test artifact store across a team: the repo describes none of those, and you are building that infrastructure yourself.

Maced AI

Maced AI

Maced deploys AI agents that crawl, fuzz, and attempt exploitation across your web apps, APIs, source code, and cloud infrastructure — then deliver audit-grade reports with proof-of-exploit payloads and merge-ready fix PRs. Every finding is auto-validated before it surfaces, which means triage queues shrink instead of growing. The continuous monitoring model means your attack surface is tested on every deploy, not just once a quarter. The ceiling shows up when your environment demands the kind of adversarial creativity a seasoned human tester brings to a novel business-logic flaw — agents that follow a structured probe loop will miss what only lateral thinking finds. Teams with that requirement use Maced for baseline and point a human at what the agents flag as high-severity.

AttributeCatcherMaced AI
PricingFreePaid
Price—$249/mo
Pricing checkedNot checked yetNov 4, 2026
Free trialNot statedNot stated
Open sourceYesNo
Has APINoYes
Self-hosted optionYesYes
PlatformsWindows, macOSWeb-based SaaS; on-premises and air-gapped deployment available
Pros
  • Local execution with BYOK LLM routing, so teams under data residency or compliance requirements can run AI test automation without sending application traffic to a third-party SaaS.
  • LLM-provider agnostic configuration — OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, or a local Ollama model — so switching providers when API costs spike is a configuration change, not a vendor negotiation.
  • Vision-based recovery for dynamic UIs, so tests against pages where selectors shift on each render don't silently fail the way Selenium or Playwright scripts do when the DOM changes.
  • Plain English test authoring, so QA engineers who don't write automation scripts can produce and maintain test suites without a developer in the loop on every update.
  • MIT license with full source access, so teams can audit exactly what the planner is doing with their credentials and page content — no black-box cloud execution.
  • Auto-validation with proof-of-exploit payloads for every finding, so your team stops spending sprint time manually reproducing scanner noise before deciding whether to act.
  • Merge-ready fix PRs generated and retested automatically, which means remediation moves from 'ticket in backlog' to 'reviewed and merged' without a separate engineering investigation cycle.
  • Continuous scanning triggered on every deploy rather than quarterly, so a misconfiguration introduced in Tuesday's PR is caught before it reaches production — not six weeks later in an audit.
  • SOC 2 and ISO 27001 audit-ready report output, so compliance documentation is a byproduct of your normal security workflow rather than a separate manual engagement you schedule and budget for.
  • Self-hosted deployment option, so teams operating in air-gapped or strict data-residency environments can run the platform without routing source code or infrastructure details through a third-party cloud.
Cons
  • No built-in CI integration or API surface: wiring Catcher into a pull request pipeline requires wrapping a desktop Electron app externally, which is an unsupported path the docs don't describe. Teams that need automated test triggers on every commit typically abandon this and move to a headless-capable framework like Playwright with an LLM layer bolted on.
  • No shared test results, artifact storage, or team dashboard: when a test fails, the output lives on the machine that ran it. Teams with more than one QA engineer coordinating on a shared test suite are managing that coordination entirely outside the tool.
  • LLM planner reliability is bounded by prompt quality and model behavior: the repo ships a prompt writing guide precisely because poorly authored descriptions produce unreliable execution. Teams without the patience to tune prompts per test scenario will hit a wall before covering a non-trivial test suite.
  • Early-stage repo with 19 commits and zero open issues at publication time — not because nothing breaks, but because the community surface is too small to surface failure patterns. Production adoption without a larger user base means you are discovering edge cases without a community history to search.
  • Agents follow a structured crawl-fuzz-exploit loop, which means multi-step business-logic attacks that require contextual judgment — an attacker who knows your domain and chains three unrelated weak points — fall outside what the platform reliably discovers. Teams whose threat model centers on that class of vulnerability still require a human penetration tester; Maced becomes a first-pass filter, not a full engagement replacement.
  • The platform is paid-only with no free tier beyond an initial scan, so teams evaluating at scale against a large or complex environment cannot fully assess fit before committing to a subscription — at which point switching cost is real if the agents' coverage does not match the environment's actual attack surface.
  • White-box testing requires handing over source code access, and for teams at organizations where that creates legal, contractual, or procurement friction, onboarding stalls at the approval stage rather than the technical one — a problem self-hosting solves only if your ops team has bandwidth to stand up and maintain the infrastructure.

Made up your mind?

Catcher

Free

Best for Teams wanting AI test automation without SaaS lock-in

Maced AI

Paid

Best for Engineering teams seeking continuous automated security validation

Specs come from each tool's own site and docs (how we test). AIDiveForge is editorially independent.

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