Step CI vs Bruno

Free and open source

From $6 per user/month (Pro, billed annually)

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

Bruno has moved off the old one-time Golden Edition to subscriptions: Pro $6 and Ultimate $11 per user/month billed annually, with a 14-day Ultimate trial. The open-source core remains free and fully functional offline.

Everything, self-hosted

The open-source app and CLI are free and fully functional offline.

Emerging

Step CI · since 2022

Widely used

Bruno Software · since 2023

• YAML workflows are easy to review in a pull request and need no runtime knowledge.
• Generates a starting suite from an OpenAPI spec.
• Includes basic load-testing capability in the same file format.

• Collections live in Git, so they diff, branch and review like any other code.
• Offline-first with no forced account — a genuine compliance advantage.
• Imports Postman and Insomnia collections, making migration realistic.

• Looks dormant: the last npm release (2.8.2) was June 2024 and the last commit August 2024, so treat it as unmaintained until that changes.
• YAML hits a ceiling on complex conditional logic.
• Ecosystem and reporting are thin compared to established tools.

• No built-in mock servers or monitoring; it is a client and runner, not a platform.
• Younger project with a smaller ecosystem and fewer integrations.
• Team collaboration relies on your Git workflow rather than in-app features.

Hard to recommend for new work while it sits unmaintained; Bruno or Schemathesis cover the same ground with active development.

Engineering teams that want API tests versioned alongside the code they test.