SoapUI Free vs. SoapUI Pro on Jenkins

I use SoapUI Community Edition in Jenkins...  In AWS provisioned servers to boot.  :)

Pros:

1 - Avoid crazy Smartbear license cost for flex server license which is required and painful to tunnel to when in AWS since the servers are discarded and rebuilt constantly.  Only flex license would work or you would be constantly orphaning licenses when server disappears without deactivating license first.  That really applies to On-Premise servers as well.

Cons:

SoapUI Community Edition is not maintained as well as it used to be.  There are often project incompatabilities.

Work Around:

The project incompatabilities are usually able to be coded around.  Our projects use mostly Groovy Script test steps instead of test steps that are provided by Smartbear (i.e.  direct jdbc connections to database in groovy script instead of SmartBear DataSource test step.  Assertions in groovy scripts instead of service invoke test step assertions. etc...).

The key is:  Install both locally. Develop in ReadyAPI Pro and when finished, run the desired project against SoapUI Free version and see what happens.  Code around any incompatabilities in ReadyAPI Pro and repeat against SoapUI Free again.  It will be a little iterative at first, but after you identify differences and code around them, they are never an issue again.  Code that I write these days always works straight away in ReadyAPI Pro and the free version since I reuse the compatible code.   After it runs in free version locally, it is good to go to free version on Jenkins.  Do your debugging local not trial and error in Jenkins.  Use the ReadyAPI Pro version of the project as the source of truth so you don't maintain a Free vs. Pro version of the same project.

Regards