Step CI vs Hoppscotch
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 $6 per user/month (Organization, billed annually; 25% more monthly)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Self-hosting the community edition is free. The Organization plan adds an admin dashboard and vendor support; the self-hosted Enterprise edition is quote-based.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Free cloud tier and a fully functional self-hosted community edition.
Open source
MPL-2.0
MIT
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Emerging
Step CI · since 2022
Established
Hoppscotch · since 2019
Strengths
- 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.
- Nothing to install — genuinely useful for onboarding and for locked-down machines.
- Self-hosting is a single container, so internal deployment is trivial.
- Very light and fast.
Limitations
- 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.
- Browser CORS restrictions require a proxy or the desktop agent for many real requests.
- Fewer advanced testing and mocking features than Postman.
- Smaller community.
Best for
Hard to recommend for new work while it sits unmaintained; Bruno or Schemathesis cover the same ground with active development.
Teams that want a self-hosted, no-install internal API client.
All of these integrate with: OpenAPI, Docker.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.