Specmatic vs SuperTest

Free tier available

Free and open source

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

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

Open-source core covering contract testing and stubbing.

Everything, self-hosted

Emerging

Specmatic · since 2020

Widely used

OSS community · since 2014

• 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.

• Fast: no network, no separate server process, no port conflicts in CI.
• Tiny API you can learn in ten minutes.
• Works with whichever runner you already use.

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

• Node.js only, and only for services you host yourself.
• In-process testing skips the real network stack, proxies and load balancer.
• No environment management or collection concept for cross-service flows.

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

Node.js API projects testing their own routes in the unit/integration layer.