Postman vs Charles

Overview

Postman

Stacks96.1K

Followers82.5K

Votes1.8K

Forks0

Charles

Stacks140

Followers167

Votes0

Charles vs Postman: What are the differences?

Charles is a web debugging proxy tool that allows you to intercept and analyze HTTP and HTTPS traffic. On the other hand, Postman is a user-friendly tool to test and interact with APIs. Let's explore the key differences between Charles and Postman:

Proxy Functionality: Charles is primarily designed as a web debugging proxy tool that allows developers to intercept, view, and manipulate network traffic between a client and a server. It provides comprehensive features for capturing and analyzing HTTP/HTTPS requests and responses. Postman, on the other hand, is an API client tool that focuses on creating, sending, and testing API requests. While Postman includes some proxy functionality, it is not as extensive or specialized as Charles in this regard.
GUI and User Experience: Charles provides a dedicated desktop application with a feature-rich graphical user interface (GUI). It offers advanced features like request/response inspection, SSL proxying, request recording, and more. Postman also provides a GUI but has a stronger emphasis on API testing and collaboration. Its interface is designed to facilitate the creation and management of API requests, offering features like request organization, environment variables, test scripting, and team collaboration tools.
API Testing and Workflow: Postman provides features like automated testing with assertions, variable substitution, test result reporting, and collection sharing for collaborative testing. Postman's GUI is optimized for managing and executing API requests, making it a comprehensive tool for API development and testing workflows. Charles, on the other hand, is more focused on network debugging and capturing traffic, making it ideal for troubleshooting network-related issues but with less emphasis on API-specific testing and workflow management.
Pricing and Licensing: Charles is a commercial tool with a one-time license fee for usage. It offers a trial version with limited functionality and a licensed version with full features. Postman provides both free and paid versions, with the paid version offering additional features and team collaboration capabilities. The free version of Postman is suitable for individual developers, while the paid version caters to larger teams with advanced testing and collaboration requirements.

In summary, Charles is primarily a web debugging proxy tool that specializes in intercepting and analyzing network traffic, while Postman is a comprehensive API client with extensive testing and collaboration features.

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Advice on Postman, Charles

Jagdeep

Tech Lead at Founder and Lightning

May 6, 2019

Reviewon

Postman

I use Postman because of the ease of team-management, using workspaces and teams, runner, collections, environment variables, test-scripts (post execution), variable management (pre and post execution), folders (inside collections, for better management of APIs), newman, easy-ci-integration (and probably a few more things that I am not able to recall right now).

411k views411k

Comments

dakotamcinnis

Oct 12, 2021

Decided

OpenAPI is an excellent tool for creating interactive and hosted documents when releasing an API to the public. We will leverage this, specifically for the public facing APIs that customers can integrate into (to automate creating projects and storing experiment data). Postman is more complicated to share with others and is not as rich for documentation.

19.6k views19.6k

Comments

StackShare

May 1, 2019

Needs advice

From a StackShare Community member: "I just started working for a start-up and we are in desperate need of better documentation for our API. Currently our API docs is in a README.md file. We are evaluating Postman and Swagger UI. Since there are many options and I was wondering what other StackSharers would recommend?"

382k views382k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Postman	Charles
It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.	Charles is a web proxy (HTTP Proxy / HTTP Monitor) that runs on your own computer. Your web browser (or any other Internet application) is then configured to access the Internet through Charles, and Charles is then able to record and display for you all of the data that is sent and received.
Compact layout;HTTP requests with file upload support;Formatted API responses for JSON and XML;Image previews;Request history;Basic Auth, OAuth 1.0, OAuth 2.0, and other common auth helpers;Autocomplete for URL and header values;Key/value editors for adding parameters or header values. Works for URL parameters too.;Use environment variables to easily shift between settings. Great for testing production, staging or local setups.;Keyboard shortcuts to maximize your productivity;Automatically generated web documentation;Mock servers hosted on Postman’s cloud;API monitoring run from Postman cloud	SSL Proxying – view SSL requests and responses in plain text;Bandwidth Throttling to simulate slower Internet connections including latency;AJAX debugging – view XML and JSON requests and responses as a tree or as text;AMF – view the contents of Flash Remoting / Flex Remoting messages as a tree;Repeat requests to test back-end changes;Edit requests to test different inputs;Breakpoints to intercept and edit requests or responses;Validate recorded HTML, CSS and RSS/atom responses using the W3C validator
Statistics
GitHub Forks 0	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 96.1K	Stacks 140
Followers 82.5K	Followers 167
Votes 1.8K	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 490 Easy to use 369 Great tool 276 Makes developing rest api's easy peasy 156 Easy setup, looks good 144 The best api workflow out there Cons 10 Stores credentials in HTTP 9 Bloated features and UI 8 Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens 7 Poor GraphQL support 5 Expensive	No community feedback yet
Integrations
HipChat Keen Slack Dropbox Datadog PagerDuty Bigpanda Microsoft Teams Newman VictorOps	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Postman, Charles?

Swagger UI

Swagger UI is a dependency-free collection of HTML, Javascript, and CSS assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation and sandbox from a Swagger-compliant API

Paw

Paw is a full-featured and beautifully designed Mac app that makes interaction with REST services delightful. Either you are an API maker or consumer, Paw helps you build HTTP requests, inspect the server's response and even generate client code.

Apiary

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Karate DSL

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ReadMe.io

It is an easy-to-use tool to help you build out documentation! Each documentation site that you publish is a project where there is space for documentation, interactive API reference guides, a changelog, and much more.

Appwrite

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Runscope

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Insomnia REST Client

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RAML

RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML) makes it easy to manage the whole API lifecycle from design to sharing. It's concise - you only write what you need to define - and reusable. It is machine readable API design that is actually human friendly.