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  5. Pactflow vs Postman

Pactflow vs Postman

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Postman
Postman
Stacks96.1K
Followers82.5K
Votes1.8K
Forks0
Pactflow
Pactflow
Stacks8
Followers22
Votes0

Pactflow vs Postman: What are the differences?

Pactflow and Postman are two popular tools in the software development industry. Although they both serve the purpose of API testing, there are several key differences between them.
  1. Testing Scope: Pactflow focuses on contract testing, where service consumers and providers agree on a contract and verify its implementation. It allows testing at the integration level to ensure end-to-end compatibility. On the other hand, Postman provides a comprehensive platform for API testing, including functionality to create and run tests, monitor performance, and collaborate with team members. It supports a broader range of testing scenarios beyond just contract testing.

  2. Workflow Integration: Pactflow integrates seamlessly with continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. It enables automated deployment validation by checking the contracts during the build and release process. Postman, on the other hand, offers collaboration features and integrations with popular development tools like Jira, Slack, and GitHub. It focuses on enhancing the overall API development workflow and team collaboration.

  3. Language Support: Pactflow supports multiple languages such as Ruby, JavaScript, and JVM languages. It provides bindings and plugins for different platforms, making it easier to implement contract testing in various technologies. Postman, on the other hand, supports a wide range of programming languages, allowing developers to write tests using their preferred language.

  4. Environment Configuration: Pactflow allows the configuration of test environments, enabling the simulation of real-world scenarios that are crucial for contract testing. It provides tools to manage different environments and handle environment-specific variables. Postman also supports environment configuration but primarily focuses on managing API request and response variables for easy testing and automation.

  5. Mocking and Virtualization: Pactflow allows the creation of mock services that simulate the behavior of the API provider. This helps the consumers to effectively test their API integration without depending on the actual provider. Postman, on the other hand, provides virtualization capabilities, allowing developers to create mock servers for testing purposes. It enables teams to simulate API responses and test different scenarios without relying on the actual backend systems.

  6. Pricing and Licensing: Pactflow and Postman have different pricing models. Pactflow follows a subscription-based pricing model, with different tiers based on the usage and requirements of the organization. Postman offers a freemium model, where a basic version of the tool is available for free, and additional features and capabilities can be accessed through paid plans. The pricing model and licensing options can vary, so it is important to evaluate based on the specific needs and budget of the organization.

In summary, Pactflow focuses on contract testing and integration with CI/CD pipelines, supporting multiple languages, while Postman offers a broader range of API testing capabilities, collaboration features, and virtualization options, with a freemium pricing model.

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Advice on Postman, Pactflow

Jagdeep
Jagdeep

Tech Lead at Founder and Lightning

May 6, 2019

ReviewonPostmanPostman

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
StackShare
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
Stephen
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.

361k views361k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Postman
Postman
Pactflow
Pactflow

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

Deploy into production with impunity, and have visibility into the integration of your stack. It ensures that all components are communicating correctly before a release, without costly and brittle integration tests. We integrate with Pact and Spring Cloud Contract, enabling powerful collaboration features for the enterprise.

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
Integration: Integrates with Pact and Spring Cloud Contract contract testing frameworks; Webhook management: integrate Webhooks to orchestrate a CI/CD pipeline; SSO: Login with Google, Github or an OIDC/SAML provider; Verification results: Get instant feedback on failed tests and pinpoint which API interaction failed; Secrets management: store encrypted values for use in Webhooks; Auditing: integrate into your SOC through our Audit API
Statistics
GitHub Forks
0
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
96.1K
Stacks
8
Followers
82.5K
Followers
22
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
HipChat
Keen
Keen
Slack
Slack
Dropbox
Dropbox
Datadog
Datadog
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Bigpanda
Bigpanda
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams
Newman
Newman
VictorOps
VictorOps
GitHub
GitHub
Spring Cloud
Spring Cloud

What are some alternatives to Postman, Pactflow?

Swagger UI

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

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

Apiary

It takes more than a simple HTML page to thrill your API users. The right tools take weeks of development. Weeks that apiary.io saves.

Karate DSL

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.

ReadMe.io

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

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

Runscope

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

Istio

Istio

Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.

Insomnia REST Client

Insomnia REST Client

Insomnia is a powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication for Mac, Window, and Linux.

RAML

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.

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