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testcritic

WireMock vs Mockoon

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 tier available

Free tier

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

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

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

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.

Free tier

Open-source WireMock is complete and free.

The desktop app and CLI are free and open source.

Open source

Apache-2.0

MIT

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaJavaScriptTypeScriptPythonGoC#
JavaScriptCodeless

Platforms

API
API

Fits teams

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

Adoption

Category standard

WireMock Inc. · since 2013

Widely used

Mockoon · since 2017

Strengths

  • 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.
  • 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.

Limitations

  • 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.
  • 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.

Best for

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

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

All of these integrate with: Docker, GitHub Actions.

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