Insomnia REST Client vs Retrofit

Overview

Retrofit

Stacks386

Followers198

Votes0

GitHub Stars43.8K

Forks7.3K

Insomnia REST Client

Stacks800

Followers652

Votes44

Insomnia REST Client vs Retrofit: What are the differences?

What is Insomnia REST Client? The most intuitive cross-platform REST API Client 😴. Insomnia is a powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication for Mac, Window, and Linux.

What is Retrofit? A type-safe HTTP client for Android and Java. Retrofit turns your HTTP API into a Java interface.

Insomnia REST Client and Retrofit can be primarily classified as "API" tools.

Some of the features offered by Insomnia REST Client are:

Mac, Windows and Linux
Data import/export
SSL client certificates

On the other hand, Retrofit provides the following key features:

URL parameter replacement and query parameter support
Object conversion to request body (e.g., JSON, protocol buffers)
Multipart request body and file upload

Insomnia REST Client and Retrofit are both open source tools. Retrofit with 33K GitHub stars and 6.13K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Insomnia REST Client with 10.2K GitHub stars and 590 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Insomnia REST Client has a broader approval, being mentioned in 35 company stacks & 30 developers stacks; compared to Retrofit, which is listed in 19 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Retrofit, Insomnia REST Client

Stephen

Artificial Intelligence Fellow

Feb 4, 2020

Decided

Postman supports automation and organization in a way that Insomnia just doesn't. Admittedly, Insomnia makes it slightly easy to query the data that you get back (in a very MongoDB-esque query language) but Postman sets you up to develop the code that you would use in development/testing right in the editor.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Retrofit	Insomnia REST Client
Retrofit turns your HTTP API into a Java interface	Insomnia is a powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication for Mac, Window, and Linux.
URL parameter replacement and query parameter support; Object conversion to request body (e.g., JSON, protocol buffers); Multipart request body and file upload	Mac, Windows and Linux;Data import/export;SSL client certificates;Response history;JSONPath and XPath;Preview rendered HTML;Multipart form;Query parameter editor;Configurable proxy;Cloud sync and sharing;Nunjucks templating;Filter requests;Toggle SSL validation;Keyboard shortcuts;Configurable timeout;HAR import;Usable at almost all sizes;Drag-n-drop organization;Responsive interface;Import from curl;
Statistics
GitHub Stars 43.8K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 7.3K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 386	Stacks 800
Followers 198	Followers 652
Votes 0	Votes 44
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet	Pros 16 Easy to work with 11 Great user interface 6 Works with GraphQL 4 Cross platform, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux 3 Opensource Cons 4 Do not have team sharing options 2 Do not store credentials in HTTP

What are some alternatives to Retrofit, Insomnia REST Client?

Postman

It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.

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.

Karate DSL

Combines API test-automation, mocks and performance-testing into a single, unified framework. The BDD syntax popularized by Cucumber is language-neutral, and easy for even non-programmers. Besides powerful JSON & XML assertions, you can run tests in parallel for speed - which is critical for HTTP API testing.

Appwrite

Appwrite's open-source platform lets you add Auth, DBs, Functions and Storage to your product and build any application at any scale, own your data, and use your preferred coding languages and tools.

Runscope

Keep tabs on all aspects of your API's performance with uptime monitoring, integration testing, logging and real-time monitoring.

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.

Apigee

API management, design, analytics, and security are at the heart of modern digital architecture. The Apigee intelligent API platform is a complete solution for moving business to the digital world.

Hoppscotch

It is a free, fast and beautiful API request builder. It helps you create requests faster, saving precious time on development

Falcor

Falcor lets you represent all your remote data sources as a single domain model via a virtual JSON graph. You code the same way no matter where the data is, whether in memory on the client or over the network on the server.

DuckRails

DuckRails is an open source development tool that helps developer mock API endpoints quickly & dynamically outside the application code.

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Insomnia REST Client vs Retrofit