Step CI vs Hoppscotch

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.

Step CIHoppscotch

Entry price

Free and open source

Open source

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

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

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

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

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

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

Open source

MPL-2.0

MIT

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

CodelessJavaScript

JavaScript

Platforms

API

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market

Adoption

Emerging

Step CI · since 2022

Established

Hoppscotch · since 2019

Strengths

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.

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.

Limitations

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

Best for

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

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

All of these integrate with: OpenAPI, Docker.

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