Hoverfly vs Tonic.ai

Free and open source

Quote on request

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

Enterprise quote-based pricing by data volume and connected databases.

Everything, self-hosted

Free trial.

Emerging

SpectoLabs · since 2016

Established

Tonic.ai · since 2018

• 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.

• Preserves referential integrity and statistical distribution, so applications behave as they do in production.
• Directly addresses the GDPR and HIPAA exposure created by production data in lower environments.
• Subsetting produces a small but coherent slice rather than a full copy.

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

• Expensive, with enterprise-only pricing.
• Initial configuration of sensitive-field classification takes real effort.
• Adds a pipeline stage that must be maintained as the schema evolves.

Teams needing lightweight service virtualisation against real recorded traffic.

Organisations that currently copy production data into staging and know they should stop.