Hoverfly vs WireMock

Free and open source

Free tier available

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

Open source is free; WireMock Cloud is a paid hosted service for shared team mocks.

Everything, self-hosted

Open-source WireMock is complete and free.

Emerging

SpectoLabs · since 2016

Category standard

WireMock Inc. · since 2013

• 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.

• Fault and latency injection lets you test the error paths that never occur on demand in a real sandbox.
• Record-and-replay produces a realistic mock from live traffic quickly.
• Runs anywhere: embedded, standalone, container or cloud.

• Smaller community and slower development than WireMock.
• Proxy configuration in complex networks takes effort.
• Captured simulations need periodic refresh.

• Recorded stubs drift from the real service unless you re-record or verify contracts.
• Complex stateful scenarios get verbose in JSON.
• HTTP only — not for message queues or gRPC without extensions.

Teams needing lightweight service virtualisation against real recorded traffic.

Teams whose integration tests depend on third-party HTTP services.