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testcritic

Mockoon vs WireMock

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 $100 per month (Team, billed annually, up to 5 members)

Free tier

Free tier available

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

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.

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

Free tier

The desktop app and CLI are free and open source.

Open-source WireMock is complete and free.

Open source

MIT

Apache-2.0

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptCodeless
JavaJavaScriptTypeScriptPythonGoC#

Platforms

API
API

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Widely used

Mockoon · since 2017

Category standard

WireMock Inc. · since 2013

Strengths

  • 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.
  • 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.

Limitations

  • 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.
  • 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.

Best for

Front-end developers unblocking themselves while a backend is still being built.

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

All of these integrate with: Docker, GitHub Actions.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.