Keploy Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

Keploy is an open source testing agent that records real API traffic with eBPF and replays it as deterministic tests with the dependencies mocked out. It gets you integration coverage without writing the tests. Best for: backend teams with production services and almost no test suite. Price: free open source plus a Playground tier, Pro from $19/user/mo. Rating: 8.2/10

What is Keploy?

Keploy turns real application traffic into test cases. It sits at the kernel socket layer using eBPF, watches the API calls your service receives and the outbound calls it makes to databases, queues and third-party APIs, then writes both sides to disk as reproducible test cases with matching mocks. Replay those recordings later and you get an integration test that runs without a database, without Kafka, and without the payment provider’s sandbox being up. The recorded artefacts are human-editable YAML rather than a binary blob, which matters more than it sounds when a test starts failing for the wrong reason.

The project was founded in 2021 by Neha Gupta and Shubham Jain, is licensed Apache 2.0, and has passed 18,000 GitHub stars with over a million VS Code extension installs. Keploy Inc. is registered in Dover, Delaware and the company is backed by Google for Startups. The framing has shifted over the past year from “record and replay tests” to “sandboxes for AI-generated code”, which is a marketing pivot but a defensible one: if an agent is writing your code faster than your team can review it, traffic-derived regression tests are one of the few checks that scale at the same speed.

What Are Keploy’s Key Features?

eBPF traffic recording with no code changes

This is the differentiator. Keploy hooks network I/O at the syscall level, so it does not need a language SDK, a proxy sidecar or a single import statement in your application. That makes it genuinely language-agnostic: Go, Node, Python, Java, whatever your service is written in. The trade-off is a Linux kernel dependency. On macOS you are running through Docker, and users do report friction with local setups that stray from the documented happy path. If your development environment is Linux or containerised, this is close to magic. If it is not, expect a slower start.

Automatic dependency mocking

When Keploy records a request, it also records every outbound call that request triggered. Replay uses those recordings as mocks, so the test runs with no live Postgres, no Redis, no external API. That is what makes the output usable in CI, where spinning up a full dependency stack is the thing that makes integration tests slow and flaky. The honest caveat is stub drift: when a dependency’s response shape changes, recorded stubs go stale and you re-record. That is inherent to the approach rather than a Keploy bug, but it is real maintenance.

AI test generation from specs

Beyond passive recording, Keploy generates test suites from an OpenAPI schema or a Postman collection and uses AI to expand edge cases you did not think to record. The free Playground tier allows 30 test suite generations, 100 test runs, 5,000 integration and sandbox runs, and 5 AI credits per month. Pro raises those to 100 generations, 400 runs, 20,000 integration runs and 20 AI credits. Those are the numbers to check against your CI frequency before committing, because they are per month, not per project.

Coverage and CI integration

Keploy reports API and schema coverage and deduplicates near-identical recorded calls, so a high-traffic endpoint does not generate ten thousand nearly identical tests. It runs locally, in CI pipelines, and on Enterprise inside Kubernetes against production traffic. One documented gap: Keploy validates functional correctness, not performance. An endpoint that quietly gets three times slower will still pass. Pair it with something that watches latency.

How Much Does Keploy Cost?

Keploy’s paid tier starts at $19 per user per month, and the core project is free forever under Apache 2.0. Between those sits Playground, a free hosted tier with no credit card required, which covers test generation from OpenAPI or Postman specs, AI edge case expansion, local and CI runs, and human-editable YAML output. Playground caps you at 30 test suite generations, 100 test runs, 5,000 integration and sandbox runs and 5 AI credits per month.

Pro at $19 per user per month includes $19 of usage credit, faster generation with no queueing, team collaboration with free viewer seats, contract testing, load testing, spend management and email plus chat support. Overages are metered: $0.16 per generated test, $0.22 per test run, and $10 per 10,000 integration or sandbox runs. Pro is credit card only. Enterprise is custom priced and unlocks the features most teams actually want at scale: recording traffic inside Kubernetes, production traffic capture, a mock registry, org dashboards, SSO and RBAC, SOC 2, GDPR and HIPAA coverage, air-gapped deployment and a dedicated support engineer.

Against the field this is cheap. Postman’s Team plan is $19 per user per month billed annually and Enterprise is $49, but Postman is a request client with testing bolted on rather than a traffic capture engine. Speedscale, the closest commercial analogue for traffic replay, starts at $100 per GB on its Startup tier with 50GB of monthly transfer, and its Team pricing is quote-only. WireMock Cloud gives you 1,000 API calls a month free and then routes you to sales. Keploy publishing a $19 number with per-unit overage rates is unusually transparent for this category.

Who is Keploy Best For?

Use Keploy if you have a running backend service and a test suite you are embarrassed by. The whole value proposition is that you get integration coverage from traffic you already have instead of from sprint time you do not. It is strongest for microservice teams where the dependency graph makes conventional integration tests painful to stand up, and for teams shipping AI-generated code who need a regression net that keeps pace.

• Use Keploy if your services run on Linux or in containers, which is where the eBPF recording is smoothest.
• Use Keploy if you want to evaluate seriously without a sales call. The open source project and the free Playground tier both let you do that.
• Skip Keploy if you develop natively on macOS without Docker in the loop. Setup friction there is a known complaint.
• Skip Keploy if you need performance regression detection. It checks correctness, not latency.
• Skip Keploy if your APIs and dependency contracts change weekly. You will spend your time re-recording stubs.

Best Keploy Alternatives

Postman

Postman is the default API tool for most teams and it does test automation, mock servers, contract testing and monitors. Free covers individuals, Solo is $9/month, Team is $19 per user per month and Enterprise is $49 per user per month, all billed annually. Postman is broader and far more polished, with a UI anyone on the team can use. But its tests are ones you write and maintain by hand. Keploy’s pitch is that you never write them at all. Plenty of teams end up running both: Postman for exploration and collections, Keploy for regression coverage.

Speedscale

Speedscale is the most direct commercial competitor, built around capturing production traffic and replaying it for both functional and load testing, with strong Kubernetes support, chaos mocks and sensitive data redaction. Its Startup tier is priced at $100 per GB with up to 50GB of monthly transfer, and Team and Enterprise pricing is quote-only. Speedscale is the more mature enterprise product, particularly for load testing. Keploy is dramatically cheaper, open source, and easier to trial without a procurement conversation. Speedscale also offers a free local mocking tool if you want to sample the approach.

WireMock

WireMock is the open source standard for API mocking, Apache 2.0 licensed and free to self-host, with WireMock Cloud offering a free forever tier capped at 1,000 API calls per month, 3 running mock APIs, 10 requests per second and a single user, then quote-only Enterprise. WireMock is the right pick if you only need to stub dependencies and you want total control over the stub definitions. It will not generate tests or record traffic for you. Choose WireMock for deliberate hand-built mocks, Keploy for automatic ones derived from what your service actually did.

Final Verdict: Is Keploy Worth It?

Keploy solves a problem almost every backend team has and almost none want to fix manually. Recording real traffic at the kernel level with eBPF, then replaying it with dependencies mocked, is a genuinely clever approach that sidesteps the two reasons integration tests get abandoned: they take too long to write and they break because a dependency was down. Apache 2.0 licensing, 18,000-plus GitHub stars and a free Playground tier mean you can prove it works on your own service this week without asking anyone for budget.

The rough edges are real. Setup outside Linux and Docker is fiddly, documentation gets thin once you leave the tutorial path, recorded stubs need re-recording when contracts change, and the features most large teams need, Kubernetes recording and production capture, sit behind Enterprise pricing that is not published. It also will not catch performance regressions. We rate it 8.2 out of 10. For a containerised backend team with weak coverage and no time to fix it, Keploy is one of the highest-leverage tools you can install this quarter. Start with the open source version, and only pay when the usage caps start hurting.