Beeceptor is the fastest way to a shareable mock URL — paste a rule, get a hosted endpoint, inspect requests. Gostly answers a different constraint: keep the traffic inside your perimeter, and record real behaviour instead of authoring rules. Both are good; they solve for different teams.
Beeceptor earns its popularity honestly. In under a minute you get a hosted endpoint, a clean rules editor, and a request inspector that is genuinely excellent for debugging webhooks and callbacks. For a frontend dev who needs a fake API, or anyone who wants a shareable mock with zero install, it is hard to beat.
The trade-off is the hosting model. Beeceptor mocks live on Beeceptor’s cloud, and the responses are rules you write by hand. That is exactly what most teams want — until two things become true: the traffic cannot leave your network (compliance, customer data, an internal API), or the mock has to match what the real API actually does, not what you remembered to type into a rule.
Gostly is built for that case. It ships as a single Rust binary you put in front of your upstream, runs in LEARN mode for an hour, then replays the recorded traffic byte-for-byte in MOCK mode — including HTTPS. Nothing leaves your perimeter; sensitive headers are redacted before anything is written to disk. There is no LLM in the request path.
| Feature | Beeceptor | Gostly |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting model | SaaS (hosted endpoints) | Self-hosted (single binary or K8s) |
| Traffic stays inside your perimeter | No | Yes |
| Mock source | Hand-authored rules | Recorded from real traffic |
| Records real upstream traffic | Proxy mode (selective) | Default workflow, byte-for-byte |
| Captures real HTTPS / TLS traffic | No | Yes |
| Deterministic byte-for-byte replay | No | Yes |
| Shareable hosted endpoint, zero install | Yes | No |
| Webhook / request inspector UI | excellent | capture + replay |
| Stateful flows | No | shipping (statechart) |
| PII redacted before it hits disk | n/a (hosted) | Yes |
| AI gap-fill grounded by your traffic (opt-in) | No | Yes |
| Single Rust binary, self-host | No | Yes |
Beeceptor offers a local mock CLI for offline use, but its dashboard, sharing, and request inspector are hosted. AI gap-fill on Gostly is opt-in and grounded by your recordings, not a free-text prompt.
Choose Beeceptor when
Choose Gostly when
| Tier | Beeceptor | Gostly |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Rate-limited shared hosted endpoint | OSS proxy (FSL) · unlimited services, self-hosted |
| Pro / Solo | Paid hosted plan (custom domain, higher limits) | $10 / mo single user |
| Team | Team hosted plan (seats, retention) | $79 / seat / mo |
| Self-host / Enterprise | Local mock CLI only — no self-hosted dashboard | $499 / mo Self-host · $25K+ Enterprise |
For a single dev who just needs a hosted endpoint, Beeceptor is cheaper and faster — full stop. The comparison only changes shape when your constraint becomes “the traffic can’t leave our network” or “the mock has to match what the real API actually returned.” At that point self-hosting and recording stop being features and start being the requirement.
Beeceptor mocks are rules you wrote, not recordings — so there are no mappings to import. Point Gostly at the same upstream Beeceptor was proxying, record real traffic for an hour, and replay it. You get the real shapes, not the ones you remembered to type.
# point Gostly at your real upstream, record an hour of traffic
$ gostly learn --service payments-api --upstream https://api.example.com
✓ Recording… 124 calls captured
# flip to replay — byte-for-byte, offline, in your perimeter
$ gostly mock --service payments-api
✓ Serving recorded responses on :8080 (0 live calls)Self-hosted, recorded from real traffic, deterministic in CI. Run it against your staging upstream for an hour and see whether it produces a mock you trust.
Evaluating for a team of 3+? We’d love to talk before you commit.