Hoverfly vs Prism

Free and open source

Free and open source

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Emerging

SpectoLabs · since 2016

Established

Stoplight (SmartBear) · since 2017

• 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.

• The mock is generated from the spec, so it cannot silently diverge from the contract.
• Validation proxy mode checks that a real implementation matches its own spec.
• Zero configuration beyond having an OpenAPI file.

• Smaller community and slower development than WireMock.
• Proxy configuration in complex networks takes effort.
• Captured simulations need periodic refresh.

• Useless without an accurate OpenAPI document.
• Limited stateful behaviour — it is spec-driven, not scenario-driven.
• Generated example data is uninteresting unless examples are in the spec.

Teams needing lightweight service virtualisation against real recorded traffic.

Design-first API teams who want mocks that are provably in sync with the contract.