Mockaroo vs LocalStack

From $60 per year (indicative, Silver)

From $39 per licence/month (Base, billed annually; $45 monthly)

Cheap for what it does; higher tiers raise row limits and add API quota.

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 for up to 1,000 rows per download and a limited number of saved schemas.

Hobby tier is free but explicitly non-commercial, and LocalStack has said the Community emulator will no longer receive product updates.

Established

Mockaroo LLC · since 2014

Category standard

LocalStack · since 2017

• No code required — an analyst or tester can design a dataset themselves.
• Very large library of realistic field types including regional formats.
• Formula fields allow simple business rules between columns.

• 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.

• Referential integrity across related tables is limited.
• Free-tier row limits are low for realistic volume testing.
• Data is generated on a third-party service, which needs a privacy check for schema sensitivity.

• 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.

Quickly producing a realistic dataset for a demo, a load test or a new environment.

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.