Soap-ui is used for test soap protocols.Soap has paid and free versions. In free version we can’t really automate the tasks . The max we can do is to add script assertions etc.

But if we want to run multiple tests from excel files that is we want to parameterize our test cases that can be only done if we open our project in eclipse using WSDL objects etc.

And same way there are not any options available in soap-ui free version to generate reports.

We have to again use eclipse to generate html reports etc.

Free version is only used to soap protocols.

Paid version is used to test both soap and rest protocols.