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Alamofire vs Postman: What are the differences?
Developers describe Alamofire as "HTTP networking library for iOS and macOS". It is a Swift-based HTTP networking library for iOS and macOS. It provides an elegant interface on top of Apple's Foundation networking stack that simplifies a number of common networking tasks. On the other hand, Postman is detailed as "Only complete API development environment". Postman is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.
Alamofire and Postman can be primarily classified as "API" tools.
Alamofire is an open source tool with 31.3K GitHub stars and 5.61K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Alamofire's open source repository on GitHub.
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?"
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).
PostmanI recommend Postman because it's easy to use with history option. Also, it has very great features like runner, collections, test scripts runners, defining environment variables and simple exporting and importing data.
I use Swagger UI because it's an easy tool for end-consumers to visualize and test our APIs. It focuses on that ! And it's directly embedded and delivered with the APIs. Postman's built-in tools aren't bad, but their main focus isn't the documentation and also, they are hosted outside the project.
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.
Pros of Alamofire
Pros of Postman
- Easy to use486
- Great tool369
- Makes developing rest api's easy peasy274
- Easy setup, looks good155
- The best api workflow out there143
- History feature53
- It's the best53
- Adds real value to my workflow44
- Great interface that magically predicts your needs42
- The best in class app34
- Can save and share script11
- Fully featured without looking cluttered9
- Collections7
- Option to run scrips7
- Global/Environment Variables7
- Dead simple and useful. Excellent6
- Shareable Collections6
- Dark theme easy on the eyes6
- Awesome customer support5
- Great integration with newman5
- Simple4
- The test script is useful4
- Documentation4
- Easy as pie3
- Saves responses3
- Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,33
- This has simplified my testing significantly3
- API-network2
- I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis2
- Mocking API calls with predefined response2
- Easy to setup, test and provides test storage1
- Graph1
- Postman Runner CI Integration1
- Now supports GraphQL1
- Continuous integration using newman1
- Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable1
- <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>0
- Runner0
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Cons of Alamofire
Cons of Postman
- Stores credentials in HTTP9
- Poor GraphQL support7
- Bloated features and UI7
- Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens7
- Expensive3
- Not free after 5 users2
- Can't prompt for per-request variables2
- Support websocket1
- Import curl1
- Import swagger1
