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testcritic

Neosync vs Mock Service Worker

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 source

Free and open source

Open source

What 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.

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

Free tier

Everything, self-hosted

Everything, self-hosted

Open source

MIT

MIT

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

GoTypeScriptCodeless
JavaScriptTypeScript

Platforms

API
WebAPI

Fits teams

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

Adoption

Emerging

Nucleus Cloud (acquired by Grow Therapy) · since 2023

Category standard

OSS community · since 2020

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.
  • One set of handlers reused across unit, component, E2E and local development.
  • Application code is completely unaware it is being mocked — no test-only branches.
  • Supports REST and GraphQL with the same model.

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.
  • JavaScript ecosystem only.
  • Service Worker registration adds a setup step and occasional caching confusion.
  • Handlers can drift from the real API without contract verification.

Best for

Realistically, nobody starting fresh. Existing self-hosted users can keep running it, but plan a migration to Tonic or a maintained alternative.

Front-end teams that want one mocking approach across every kind of test.

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