Tonic.ai vs Testcontainers

Quote on request

Free tier available

Enterprise quote-based pricing by data volume and connected databases.

Free. Testcontainers Cloud, which offloads container execution, is a paid Docker product.

Free trial.

The libraries are free and open source.

Established

Tonic.ai · since 2018

Category standard

AtomicJar (Docker) · since 2015

• Preserves referential integrity and statistical distribution, so applications behave as they do in production.
• Directly addresses the GDPR and HIPAA exposure created by production data in lower environments.
• Subsetting produces a small but coherent slice rather than a full copy.

• Tests run against the real database engine, so dialect and behaviour differences surface early.
• Containers are disposable, which removes shared-state flakiness entirely.
• Excellent language coverage with idiomatic APIs.

• Expensive, with enterprise-only pricing.
• Initial configuration of sensitive-field classification takes real effort.
• Adds a pipeline stage that must be maintained as the schema evolves.

• Requires a Docker daemon in CI, which not every environment provides.
• Container startup adds seconds to each test run unless reused carefully.
• Heavier resource usage than in-memory alternatives.

Organisations that currently copy production data into staging and know they should stop.

Integration tests that currently use in-memory databases and lie to you.