Step CI vs Pact

Free and open source

Free tier available

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

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

Emerging

Step CI · since 2022

Widely used

SmartBear / Pact Foundation · since 2013

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

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