Hoverfly vs Snaplet Seed

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.

HoverflySnaplet Seed

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.

The Seed library is open source and free; note that Snaplet wound down its hosted product, so treat this as a library rather than a service.

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

Apache-2.0

MIT

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

GoJavaPythonCodeless

TypeScriptJavaScript

Platforms

API

Fits teams

Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market

Adoption

Emerging

SpectoLabs · since 2016

Emerging

Snaplet · since 2021

Strengths

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.

Schema-aware generation means the data actually inserts and the app actually works.
Deterministic seeds make failing tests reproducible.
Good TypeScript ergonomics with Prisma and Drizzle.

Limitations

The company wound down its hosted business — evaluate the library's maintenance status before depending on it.
PostgreSQL-centric.
TypeScript ecosystem only.

Best for

Teams needing lightweight service virtualisation against real recorded traffic.

TypeScript teams that want each developer and CI run to start from a clean, coherent database.

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