Currents.dev Alternative: Priced on Storage, Not Results

Currents.dev is a test analytics and orchestration product whose bill follows a test-result meter. Its Scale plan is $49/month for 50 users and 10,000 test results per month, with $4.90 per additional 1,000 results on top (currents.dev/pricing, checked 2026-11-05). Teams start shopping for a Currents.dev alternative when that meter outgrows the base price. Gaffer’s bill follows what you store, not how many tests you run: $49/month on Team with 50 GB, 90-day default retention and unlimited users, then $0.50/GB/month. Gaffer has no test orchestration, so it does not replace that part of Currents.

Why Teams Look for Currents.dev Alternatives

Test-Result Metering

The 10,000 test results per month included on Scale cover small suites, and the meter takes over from there. Retries of the same test count as a single test result, but every test in every CI run counts. Usage scales with your test suite size and CI frequency, both of which tend to grow.

Scale billed monthly has volume discounts: 100,000 results is $315 ($3.15 per additional 1,000), 200,000 is $516 ($2.58), 400,000 is $846 ($2.11) and 500,000 is $992 ($1.98).

Assume 300 CI runs a day x 50 tests x 30 days, which is 450,000 test results and 9,000 reports a month.

Gaffer meters storage. It does not count test results, but every run adds a report, so more runs and longer retention mean more stored bytes and, past the plan’s included storage, a larger bill.

Report size decides which Gaffer row you land in, so measure your own before trusting any of them. The 2 MB figure has evidence behind it: a real Gaffer customer with 7 projects uploads more than 1,100 reports a week on Pro, which is more than 4,700 retained reports inside 10 GB at 30-day retention, or under about 2.2 MB per report, with $0 overage. Those are JUnit XML reports. The 50 MB figure is an illustrative assumption for HTML reports with traces.

The 90-day rows are not like for like, because Currents keeps artifacts for only 7 or 21 days. At or under 10,000 results a month, Currents Scale and Gaffer Team both cost $49, as long as the Gaffer reports fit in 50 GB.

No Free Tier

Currents has no free tier. Evaluation is a 14-day free trial with no credit card, all features and up to 10,000 results, not a persistent free workspace you can leave running on a side project.

Gaffer: Test Reporting Priced on Storage

Storage-Based Pricing, Unlimited Users

Gaffer has three tiers. Free is $0 with 500 MB and 7-day default retention. Pro is $15/month with 10 GB and 30-day default retention. Team is $49/month with 50 GB and 90-day default retention. Every tier includes unlimited users. Overage on Pro and Team is $0.50/GB/month. There is no test-result cap; storage is the only metered resource. On Pro and Team, retention is a per-project setting: 7, 14, 30, 60, 90, 180 or 365 days, or never delete. Free is fixed at 7 days in the dashboard. Longer retention means more stored bytes.

Same CI Upload Pattern

One step in your CI pipeline:

- name: Upload to Gaffer
  if: always()
  uses: gaffer-sh/gaffer-uploader@v2
  with:
    gaffer_upload_token: ${{ secrets.GAFFER_PROJECT_TOKEN }}
    report_path: ./test-results

Or with curl:

curl -X POST https://app.gaffer.sh/api/upload \
  -H "X-API-Key: $GAFFER_PROJECT_TOKEN" \
  -F "files=@test-results/report.xml"

JUnit XML and CTRF are both first-class. Playwright, Jest, Vitest, pytest, and Cypress all work.

MCP Code-Mode for Agentic CI

Both products expose an MCP server. The shapes differ. Currents’ MCP lists about 40 individual tools covering runs, analytics, actions, webhooks and Jira, some of which need write permissions. Gaffer’s MCP uses code-mode: two tools, search_tools and execute_code (plus list_projects for user tokens), over a set of functions like get_project_health, get_flaky_tests, get_slowest_tests, get_failure_clusters, get_test_history, get_coverage_summary, find_uncovered_failure_areas, compare_test_metrics, search_failures and list_test_runs. The agent composes JavaScript that calls those functions, rather than issuing one MCP call per operation. See GitHub Agentic Workflows with Gaffer MCP for the reasoning behind this shape.

Built-in Analytics Without Extra Configuration

Flaky detection, slowest-test surfacing, and failure clustering need no setup beyond the upload step.

Pricing Comparison

Currents figures are from currents.dev/pricing, checked 2026-11-05.

Feature Comparison

When to Use Currents.dev

Currents is the better fit if you need:

• Test orchestration. Currents includes Playwright orchestration and Smart Orchestration from Scale up. Gaffer has no test orchestration
• SSO (SAML 2.0) or SCIM, which are on Business
• Slack Connect, data redaction, self-hosting or bring-your-own storage, which are on Enterprise
• Jira, MS Teams, GitLab, or BitBucket as first-class integrations

When to Use Gaffer

Gaffer is the better fit if:

• You run well past 10,000 test results a month and your reports are small enough that stored bytes cost less than the test-result meter
• You don’t need test orchestration
• Your team is past 50 users
• You want a free tier for evaluation or for side projects
• You want to set retention per project and accept the stored bytes that come with it
• You want the MCP code-mode primitive for agentic CI workflows. See Test Intelligence for AI Tools

Migration from Currents.dev

No big-bang cutover needed.

1. Keep uploading to Currents. Nothing breaks.
2. Add a Gaffer upload step to CI using JUnit XML or CTRF output.
3. Point the team at Gaffer for sharing and historical analytics. Retire Currents when you’re ready, unless you rely on its orchestration.

Other Comparisons

Evaluating multiple tools? See how Gaffer compares to Allure, ReportPortal, TestDino, and Codecov Test Analytics. For a wider view, see 10 test reporting tools compared.

Try It

Gaffer’s free tier includes 500 MB storage and 7-day retention. Enough to measure your own report size before trusting the table above.