SuperTest 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.

Widely used

OSS community · since 2014

Widely used

SmartBear / Pact Foundation · since 2013

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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