Pact vs Step CI

Free tier available

Free and open source

Libraries are free. PactFlow, the hosted broker with governance features, is a paid SaaS priced per contract/service.

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

The Pact libraries and the open-source Pact Broker are free.

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

SmartBear / Pact Foundation · since 2013

Emerging

Step CI · since 2022

• Catches breaking API changes at build time instead of in a shared staging environment.
• The can-i-deploy check is a genuinely good answer to microservice release coordination.
• Broad language support, so polyglot estates can adopt it uniformly.

• 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.

• Requires organisational buy-in from both consumer and provider teams; unilateral adoption achieves little.
• Real conceptual learning curve — most failed adoptions are misunderstandings, not tooling problems.
• Not a substitute for integration testing of behaviour, only of the contract.

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

Microservice organisations where teams deploy independently and integration environments are a bottleneck.

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