Hoverfly vs WireMock

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.

WireMock simulates APIs and software dependencies so teams can test without live services, exercise edge cases, and build dependent features in parallel. It can match requests using URL patterns, headers, query parameters, cookies, and body content, then return templated responses or simulate delays, network faults, and malformed replies. It can also record interactions with real services and replay them during tests.

The project integrates with JUnit and other testing frameworks, with setup paths for Maven, Gradle, Scala SBT, standalone use, and Docker. Its documented capabilities cover HTTP-based protocols and REST, plus WebSockets, webhooks, HTTPS, gRPC, and GraphQL. WireMock Java is available as a standalone JAR, Docker image, experimental Helm chart, and NPM package; WireMock Cloud is another option. The Free plan costs nothing and includes 1,000 calls per month, one user, three mock APIs, and a 10 requests-per-second limit. Free and trial plans stop running mocks after their API quota is exceeded until the next quota cycle.