Specmatic vs Hoppscotch

Free tier available

From $19 per user/month (indicative, team plan)

Open source core; commercial support and an enterprise insights product are sold separately.

Self-hosting the community edition is free. Paid plans add team workspaces and enterprise SSO.

Open-source core covering contract testing and stubbing.

Free cloud tier and a fully functional self-hosted community edition.

Emerging

Specmatic · since 2020

Established

Hoppscotch · since 2019

• Spec-driven rather than consumer-driven, so it needs far less cross-team process than Pact.
• The same spec produces both the provider test and the consumer mock.
• Covers async messaging (Kafka, AsyncAPI) as well as HTTP.

• Nothing to install — genuinely useful for onboarding and for locked-down machines.
• Self-hosting is a single container, so internal deployment is trivial.
• Very light and fast.

• Only works if your specs are accurate and maintained.
• Smaller community than Pact, with fewer worked examples.
• Primarily JVM-oriented tooling.

• Browser CORS restrictions require a proxy or the desktop agent for many real requests.
• Fewer advanced testing and mocking features than Postman.
• Smaller community.

Spec-first organisations that want contract enforcement without the Pact process overhead.

Teams that want a self-hosted, no-install internal API client.