LocalStack vs Mockoon
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
From $39 per licence/month (Base, billed annually; $45 monthly)
Free tierFrom $100 per month (Team, billed annually, up to 5 members)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Plans are Hobby (free, non-commercial), Base $39 and Ultimate $89 per licence/month billed annually, then Enterprise. Commercial use needs a paid licence, and the higher tiers are what unlock advanced IAM enforcement and the wider service coverage.
Free locally and forever; the paid cloud tier adds hosted mocks and team sync. Team covers 5 members, 3 cloud-deployed mocks and 100k calls a month, with Enterprise on a quote. Work emails get a 14-day trial, others 7 days with a card.
Free tier
Hobby tier is free but explicitly non-commercial, and LocalStack has said the Community emulator will no longer receive product updates.
The desktop app and CLI are free and open source.
Open source
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
LocalStack · since 2017
Widely used
Mockoon · since 2017
Strengths
- Integration tests against AWS services run offline in seconds at no cloud cost.
- Removes the shared-sandbox-account contention that plagues cloud teams.
- Works with Terraform and CDK, so infrastructure code is testable.
- Genuinely a minute from download to a working mock API.
- Dynamic templating with faker-style helpers produces realistic responses.
- Proxy mode mocks only the routes you need and passes the rest through.
Limitations
- No longer open source: the Community edition is end-of-life, the repo is archived, and running it now requires an account and auth token.
- Using it in CI counts as commercial use, so the free tier does not cover the case most teams want it for.
- Emulation is not identical to AWS; some behaviours and IAM semantics differ.
- Desktop-first; sharing mocks across a team needs the paid cloud or a committed config file.
- HTTP only.
- Less suited to complex stateful behaviour than WireMock.
Best for
AWS-native teams whose tests currently depend on a shared cloud account, and who are willing to pay for a licence now that the free community route has closed.
Front-end developers unblocking themselves while a backend is still being built.
All of these integrate with: Docker, GitHub Actions.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.