Faker vs Hoverfly

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

FakerHoverfly

Entry price

Free and open source

Open source

Free and open source

Open source

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

MIT

Apache-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaRubyPHPGo

GoJavaPythonCodeless

Platforms

WebAPI

API

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Category standard

OSS community · since 2010

Emerging

SpectoLabs · since 2016

Strengths

Realistic, locale-aware data catches layout bugs that 'test test test' never will.
Seedable, so generated data is reproducible when a test fails.
Available in every major language with a similar API.

Capture mode produces a realistic simulation from live traffic with no authoring.
Latency injection makes it useful for performance and resilience testing too.
Small footprint — a single Go binary.

Limitations

Generated data has no referential integrity or business rules — that is your job.
Random data makes failures harder to reproduce unless you seed deliberately.
Not a substitute for production-shaped data at realistic volume.

Best for

Every project that needs fixtures more realistic than placeholder strings.

Teams needing lightweight service virtualisation against real recorded traffic.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.