Faker vs Snowfakery
Faker
faker.readthedocs.ioSnowfakery
snowfakery.readthedocs.ioSide by side
| Figure | Faker | Snowfakery |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Test Data Generation Tools | 7.7 (#10) | 7.9 (#8) |
| Purpose | Faker is a Python package for generating fake data for database bootstrapping, XML documents, stress testing, and anonymizing production data. | Snowfakery generates unique, random fake data with relationships between tables from YAML recipe files. |
| Security | The project repository links to a security policy for reporting security issues. | The documentation warns that recipes can access much of Python's power, load plugins, and call Python methods, so it advises against running untrusted recipes where they can access secure resources. |
Plans
In their own words
Snowfakery
Snowfakery generates synthetic data from YAML recipe files, including records linked across tables. Recipes can create names, addresses, text, URLs, random numbers and other values using Faker-based functions, and specify how many related objects to generate. Output can go to files in JSON, TXT, CSV, SQL, DOT, SVG, SVGZ, JPEG and PostScript formats; some diagram formats require Graphviz. Snowfakery can also write to databases accessible through SQLAlchemy, including SQLite, and generate records in Salesforce when used through CumulusCI. Python applications can embed it with its generate_data function, and Python plugins and providers can extend its functions and Faker capabilities. Strict mode checks a recipe before generation, while validate-only mode checks it without generating data. It is free, open source and self-hosted. The documentation says database output creates new tables, with generated columns as text, and that SQLite is the only database included in its SQL dataset URL test suite. The repository was archived on September 18, 2026, and is read-only.