I've never used i3, but I've tried sway and it works, though isn't at feature parity with i3. It's usable though. And as I wrote in a sibling comment, Xwayland integration is even more buggier in libwlc (used by way-cooler and sway) than it is in libweston, so be prepared for weirdness with X11 apps. Floating window support is also wonky.
sway is awesome! It's got almost all the features I'm used to from i3 (major exception being mouse support for the bar), and it's only a _little_ buggy :-)