Hoppscotch vs Step CI

From $19 per user/month (indicative, team plan)

Free and open source

Self-hosting the community edition is free. Paid plans add team workspaces and enterprise SSO.

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

Free cloud tier and a fully functional self-hosted community edition.

Everything, self-hosted

Established

Hoppscotch · since 2019

Emerging

Step CI · since 2022

• Nothing to install — genuinely useful for onboarding and for locked-down machines.
• Self-hosting is a single container, so internal deployment is trivial.
• Very light and fast.

• YAML workflows are easy to review in a pull request and need no runtime knowledge.
• Generates a starting suite from an OpenAPI spec.
• Includes basic load-testing capability in the same file format.

• Browser CORS restrictions require a proxy or the desktop agent for many real requests.
• Fewer advanced testing and mocking features than Postman.
• Smaller community.

• YAML hits a ceiling on complex conditional logic.
• Small project with limited community support.
• Ecosystem and reporting are thin compared to established tools.

Teams that want a self-hosted, no-install internal API client.

Small teams wanting declarative, repo-versioned API checks in CI.