Snaplet Seed vs Hoverfly

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.

Snaplet SeedHoverfly

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.

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

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

MIT

Apache-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

TypeScriptJavaScript

GoJavaPythonCodeless

Platforms

API

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market

Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Emerging

Snaplet · since 2021

Emerging

SpectoLabs · since 2016

Strengths

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.

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.

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

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

Teams needing lightweight service virtualisation against real recorded traffic.

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