Maestro Deck vs Maestro Studio: Source-Available Alternative Comparison

Side-by-side

Pricing

Maestro Studio is sold as a per-seat subscription tied to a mobile.dev account. Pricing scales with team size, and access to the desktop client is gated behind sign-in.

Maestro Deck is free for individuals and for internal team use. There is no seat count, no usage cap, no metered runs, and no paid tier on the desktop client. Because the source is published under BUSL-1.1, you can audit it, modify it, and ship a forked build inside your organization. The only thing the license forbids is reselling Maestro Deck as a hosted commercial service that competes with MaestroDeck Cloud.

Source-available

Studio is closed-source. You cannot read the code, file a PR, or run a hardened build in an air-gapped environment.

Deck is published in full at github.com/BlueShork/maestro-deck under the Business Source License 1.1. Issues, PRs, and discussions are public. Each release automatically converts to Apache-2.0 four years after publication, so the code you depend on today becomes fully open source on a predictable timeline.

Features

Both tools target the same surface area: authoring Maestro YAML flows, inspecting the view hierarchy of a running app, recording taps and gestures into reusable steps, and executing flows against iOS and Android targets.

Maestro Deck’s key feature is that it doesn’t bundle its own Maestro CLI. It calls the CLI you already have installed, so your flows always run against the exact version pinned in CI. No drift between “works in Studio” and “works in CI.”

Studio bundles its own runtime, which is convenient until your CI uses a different Maestro version and a flow passes locally but fails on PR.

Self-hosting and privacy

Deck runs on your machine. There is no backend service, no analytics endpoint, and no opt-out checkbox to remember to uncheck. Your flow code, your screenshots, and your device output never leave the laptop unless you explicitly push them somewhere.

Studio is cloud-tethered: it requires a mobile.dev account to launch and reports telemetry by default. For teams in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, defence) this often means Studio is a non-starter.

Compatibility

Deck reads and writes the same Maestro YAML format. If you have an existing.maestro/folder full of flows authored with Studio or the CLI, Deck opens them with no rewrite. Migration is opening the directory in Deck and continuing where you left off.

CI integration

Both tools produce flows that run on the standard Maestro CLI in CI. Because Deck uses your installed CLI, the gap between local and CI behaviour is smaller. See the CI guide for GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, and CircleCI examples.

When to choose which

Honest take: if your team is already paying for mobile.dev and using their cloud services (device farm, dashboard) end to end, Studio is the path of least resistance. mobile.dev built Maestro and they ship Studio. Pay them.

If you want a free desktop client, can’t send code to a third-party cloud, want to bring your own CLI version, or just don’t want to manage another vendor account — pick Maestro Deck.