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.
Entry price
From $9 per user/month (indicative, Cloud)
Free tierFree tier available
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free locally; the paid cloud tier adds hosted mocks and team sync.
Consumption-based on generated records; enterprise agreements available.
Free tier
The desktop app and CLI are free and open source.
Free tier with a monthly credit allowance.
Open source
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Mockoon · since 2017
Emerging
Gretel (NVIDIA) · since 2019
Strengths
Limitations
Best for
Front-end developers unblocking themselves while a backend is still being built.
Regulated organisations that need shareable data with defensible privacy properties.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.