SuperTest vs Step CI

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

Widely used

OSS community · since 2014

Emerging

Step CI · since 2022

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

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