Step CI vs REST Assured

Free and open source

Free and open source

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Emerging

Step CI · since 2022

Widely used

OSS community · since 2010

• 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.

• API tests live in the codebase, versioned and reviewed with the service.
• Readable given/when/then chains that map directly onto HTTP semantics.
• Full access to Java for setup, data and assertions.

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

• Java only, and requires developers rather than manual testers.
• No GUI, so exploratory request work needs a separate client.
• Verbose for very large payload assertions.

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

JVM teams that want API tests in the same repository as the service.