Citrus vs Hoverfly

Citrus is a free integration-test framework for messaging applications and microservices. It can make a test act as both client and server across messaging interfaces, send and sequence messages, and validate payloads and other elements. Supported endpoints include HTTP, Kafka, JMS, Apache Camel, mail, FTP/SFTP, OpenAPI, SOAP, Docker, Kubernetes, Knative, SQL, and SSH. Validation covers JSON and XML, XML schemas, DTDs, and database data. Test cases can use loops, delays, retries, parallel sections, and timeouts. Tests are written in Java, XML, YAML, or Cucumber BDD features. Citrus integrates with JUnit 5, Cucumber, JBang, Quarkus, Spring Boot, TestNG, and JUnit 4, with Maven and Gradle setup guidance. It runs on Linux and requires Java 17 or newer since version 4.0. Citrus is Apache-licensed freeware for testing commercial applications.

Hoverfly Cloud is a hosted API simulation and mocking platform for testing without live API dependencies. It handles HTTP/S services including REST, SOAP, XML, JSON, and GraphQL. Users can capture and replay traffic, generate simulations from OpenAPI specifications, and match requests by methods, headers, parameters, and bodies. Simulations can delay responses, inject faults or errors, and modify replies. A command-line interface supports scripted configuration and testing pipelines. Hoverfly and hoverctl binaries run on macOS, Linux, and Windows, while documentation covers Docker and Kubernetes installation. The underlying Hoverfly framework is open source under Apache 2, has no GUI, and is generally run locally or in a user’s infrastructure. Cloud use cases include performance testing, functional testing, and development.