Faker vs Neosync
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Free and open source
Open sourceFree and open source
Open sourceWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
The MIT-licensed code remains free to self-host. The paid cloud service no longer exists — neosync.dev is offline.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Everything, self-hosted
Open source
MIT
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
OSS community · since 2010
Emerging
Nucleus Cloud (acquired by Grow Therapy) · since 2023
Strengths
- Realistic, locale-aware data catches layout bugs that 'test test test' never will.
- Seedable, so generated data is reproducible when a test fails.
- Available in every major language with a similar API.
- Open source and self-hostable, so sensitive data never leaves your infrastructure.
- Preserves referential integrity across tables.
- The last release is feature-complete for common Postgres and MySQL anonymisation work.
Limitations
- Generated data has no referential integrity or business rules — that is your job.
- Random data makes failures harder to reproduce unless you seed deliberately.
- Not a substitute for production-shaped data at realistic volume.
- Archived and unmaintained since August 2025 — no security patches, no new connectors, no support.
- The hosted cloud has been shut down, so self-hosting is the only option.
- Fewer database connectors than the incumbents.
Best for
Every project that needs fixtures more realistic than placeholder strings.
Realistically, nobody starting fresh. Existing self-hosted users can keep running it, but plan a migration to Tonic or a maintained alternative.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.