Bruno vs Step CI

From $6 per user/month (Pro, billed annually)

Free and open source

Bruno has moved off the old one-time Golden Edition to subscriptions: Pro $6 and Ultimate $11 per user/month billed annually, with a 14-day Ultimate trial. The open-source core remains free and fully functional offline.

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

The open-source app and CLI are free and fully functional offline.

Everything, self-hosted

Widely used

Bruno Software · since 2023

Emerging

Step CI · since 2022

• Collections live in Git, so they diff, branch and review like any other code.
• Offline-first with no forced account — a genuine compliance advantage.
• Imports Postman and Insomnia collections, making migration realistic.

• 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.

• No built-in mock servers or monitoring; it is a client and runner, not a platform.
• Younger project with a smaller ecosystem and fewer integrations.
• Team collaboration relies on your Git workflow rather than in-app features.

• Looks dormant: the last npm release (2.8.2) was June 2024 and the last commit August 2024, so treat it as unmaintained until that changes.
• YAML hits a ceiling on complex conditional logic.
• Ecosystem and reporting are thin compared to established tools.

Engineering teams that want API tests versioned alongside the code they test.

Hard to recommend for new work while it sits unmaintained; Bruno or Schemathesis cover the same ground with active development.