Hoverfly 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
Apache-2.0
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Emerging
SpectoLabs · since 2016
Emerging
Nucleus Cloud (acquired by Grow Therapy) · since 2023
Strengths
- Capture mode produces a realistic simulation from live traffic with no authoring.
- Latency injection makes it useful for performance and resilience testing too.
- Small footprint — a single Go binary.
- 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
- Smaller community and slower development than WireMock.
- Proxy configuration in complex networks takes effort.
- Captured simulations need periodic refresh.
- 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
Teams needing lightweight service virtualisation against real recorded traffic.
Realistically, nobody starting fresh. Existing self-hosted users can keep running it, but plan a migration to Tonic or a maintained alternative.
All of these integrate with: Kubernetes.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.