I would like to hear if any of you are using different app for API testing than Postman.
I’m not telling that Postman is bad, but maybe there’s all that I should check out. Recently I tried RapidApi and even tho the app is kinda cool I missed few options and went back to Postman for now.
Insomnia is great and has an easy, simple interface. But I feel like creating complex collections with different environments is a lot simpler with postman
I am a fan of Insomnia. As far as I can tell it has most of the features I used in postman without all the paid upgrade nags
Insomnia is really good, never looked back at postman since i use Insomnia!
The one thing I find difficult in Insomnia is making the auth common across a group of requests. I end up duplicating existing requests which doesn’t help if I need to update the process at all. Is there a way to use common auth routines yet?
Seconding Insomnia. Sleeker interface imo, only thing it’s lacking in feature parity afaik is the cookie sniffer, but you can grab what you need in postman or js console and then plug it into insomnia np.
Also, cURL :]
ducaale/xh is excellent for anybody that likes to use HTTP from a CLI.
Yep, these command line tools seems really cool!
When I was using GUI API Testing tools, I prefer using APIDog, their UI is much easier to use and I can easily migrate my Postman scripts.
I’m the maintainer of HTTP Toolkit - it’s not a Postman alternative (it’s an open source project focused on intercepting & debugging traffic, not sending it) but I’m actually working on building a UI for exactly this right now, so this thread is perfectly timed!
Is there anything that any of you really love or hate about any of the tools suggested here?
What core features beyond just “edit method+URL+headers+body, send, view the response status+headers+body” are essential to you?
Anything you wish these tools could do better?
I’m planning on taking the client functionality live within a few weeks max, so if you want to help your perfect Postman alternative come to life now’s the moment 😁
The big three for me are:
- For a given project, maintain a list of HTTP requests I often need to send
- Some way to save responses, so I can compare how the server does respond to how it previously responded.
- Both need to be shared with my colleagues. And this must not share any auth credentials/tokens/etc that are in every request (I want that do be done separately with something more secure).
Insomnia, or if you really love the command line and dont need to document or save your API requests, curl (don’t recommend this for anything beyond simple testing).
If you like the command line but want something more user friendly than curl, I suggest httpie.
Oh this looks interesting. I will definitely give it a shot.
I completely stopped using all those clients. We now just store the requests alongside the code in an http file and use the built in IntelliJ HTTP Client to make the call. No need for a separate program, integrates with your code, you can save responses to make sure they don’t change, it’s all stored in git. There’s a ton of benefits and not many downsides.
Once I learned about http files I never went back. It’s so easy to share and use, I primarily use JetBrains but there are extensions for VSCode that do the same thing that I have used as well.
What is an HTTP file?
I recommend Visual Studio Code and one of the following two extensions:
Either one isn’t really the full picture - you’ll ned to combine it with other extensions - such as a good JSON language extension (which will give you syntax highlighting, error checking, code folding/etc.
The most important extension is CoPilot. That’s the killer feature which makes Visual Studio Code vastly better than Postman.
Thunder is very similar to Postman. Not much to say other than it works well, it’s free, millions of people use it.
It’s not really my cup of tea, but I do think it’s better than Postman because you can use your own version control servers to collaborate with colleagues, which is generally better (and cheaper) than Postman’s collaboration service in my opinion (you get diffs, code review, pull requests, history, etc etc for all your most important API tests).
Personally I prefer REST Client (also free, and has even more users than Thunder).
REST Client is really simple. It adds a new “HTTP” text file type. You simply type a HTTP request into the file and hit a hotkey (or click a button) to execute the request. And it shows you the response. Easy.
HTTP requests and responses are just plain text, and you can simply save those as files in your project. REST Client also has basic support for variables, API credentials, etc. Not quite as user friendly as Postman or Thunder Client, but it makes up for that by being straightforward and flexible.
CoPilot Chat, works with both, but having everything in plain text gives it more control over REST Client than Thunder Clinet you can write (and edit) your requests with a series of simple plain english prompts. E.g. “JSON request with a blog post body” will give you:
POST https://example.com/blog/posts Content-Type: application/json { "title": "My First Blog Post", "body": "This is the content of my first blog post. It's not very long, but it's a start!", "author": "John Doe", "tags": ["blogging", "first post"] }
You might follow that up with “Add a UUID” or “Add a JWT auth header”.
Copilot can answer questions too - e.g. “How do I unsubscribe a user with the Mailchimp API?” They use the “HTTP PATCH” request type - WTF.
xh and tiny shell scripts.
Example: sign-up-forbidden-username.req
#!/bin/bash xh POST http://0.0.0.0:2884/sign-up usename=admin password=pw
to run
./sign-up-forbidden-username.req
This returns 403 and “Username is unavailable”
xh is a rust implementation of httpie. They’re going for full parity, and works really well for what I need it for so far You can also read input from a file. Which IMO makes GUI API testing seem silly.
Hoppscotch is pretty cool
Insomnia is pretty cool and open-source
I use Hurl. Everything is just a text file:
POST https://example.org/api/tests { "id": "4568", "evaluate": true } HTTP 200 [Asserts] header "X-Frame-Options" == "SAMEORIGIN" jsonpath "$.status" == "RUNNING" # Check the status code jsonpath "$.tests" count == 25 # Check the number of items jsonpath "$.id" matches /\d{4}/ # Check the format of the id
is it based on the http file standard? https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/exploring-http-syntax.html
it seems like even jetbrains has a cli you can use https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-cli.html#environment-variables
It’s very similar to what JetBrains has and you can easily translate between the two (assuming you aren’t using assertions or any Hurl-specific features), but not exactly the same syntax.
I tend to go with Hurl because it’s self contained and you can do things like throw it in your CI builds.
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I am alternating between Postman and https://hoppscotch.io, it’s open source (https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch) and has great feature set.
As it’s a web app, and a minor downside is that you have to have to install a browser extension (open-source as well) or use a proxy in order to aviod CORS issues.
As a lot of other comments have already suggested, HTTP Toolkit is a good alternative and I used it quite a bit prior to discovering Postman…
Maybe try Swagger
Surprised how little love this option is getting in the comments. Not only will swagger be generated for you from your openapi spec, it has a clean fast UI and shared auth.
I’m saying that Postman is bad. maybe not in terms of functionality, but damn if it doesn’t run like a slug on my work computer, which is just fine handling a dozen Visual Studio and Rider instances. It seems like it works perfectly for about 5 minutes and then goes to crap.
So yeah, I’d be interested in an alternative too. I only really use it for basic functionality (creating, sharing, and running collections of requests with configurable parameters).
Given that you have Rider, if you name a file
foo.http
it will give you an API testing tool. You can set up multiple environments (selectable in a drop down).There are a bunch of examples on the right hand side. Note the
Requests with Tests
option which also allows you to run the entire collection.And you can run some JavaScript and inject values into the client.global which would allow you to then do the desired configuration (look at
Requests with Authorization
there).… and lastly, since this is a file that’s part of your Rider project, you can check it in and share it along with the rest of the code for the project.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/rider/Http_client_in__product__code_editor.html
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/rider/Exploring_HTTP_Syntax.html
Same for me, I’ll notice my computer is a bit loud, realise I forgot to close postman and it’s just sitting there, doing nothing, minimised, and my 12 core CPU is sat at 20%.
I close postman, within seconds the fans spin down.
I’ve tried a few alternatives but the rest of the team use postman and we’ve got shared collections and pretty extensive pre-request scripts and nothing else I’ve tried really fits the bill.
There is always the web version of postman. It can make localhost calls if you install their desktop agent. Might have better memory management somehow? I dunno.