Neosync vs Mockaroo
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 sourceFrom $60 per year (indicative, Silver)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
The MIT-licensed code remains free to self-host. The paid cloud service no longer exists — neosync.dev is offline.
Cheap for what it does; higher tiers raise row limits and add API quota.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Free for up to 1,000 rows per download and a limited number of saved schemas.
Open source
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Emerging
Nucleus Cloud (acquired by Grow Therapy) · since 2023
Established
Mockaroo LLC · since 2014
Strengths
- 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.
- 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.
Limitations
- 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.
- 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.
Best for
Realistically, nobody starting fresh. Existing self-hosted users can keep running it, but plan a migration to Tonic or a maintained alternative.
Quickly producing a realistic dataset for a demo, a load test or a new environment.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.