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API Blueprint vs Postman: What are the differences?
- Protocol Support: API Blueprint only supports HTTP-based APIs, while Postman supports a variety of protocols including HTTP, REST, and SOAP. This allows Postman to be more versatile in handling different types of APIs.
- Collaboration Features: Postman provides extensive collaboration features such as team workspaces, shared collections, and role-based access control, which API Blueprint lacks. This makes Postman a better choice for teams working on API development collaboratively.
- Mock Servers: Postman allows users to create and run mock servers for testing APIs, a feature that is not available in API Blueprint. This enables developers to simulate API responses and test their functionality without the need for a fully functional backend.
- Automation and Testing: Postman offers robust automation and testing capabilities through its collection runner and Newman CLI tool, which API Blueprint lacks. This allows developers to automate the testing of APIs and integrate them into continuous integration pipelines easily.
- API Monitoring: Postman provides API monitoring and performance testing features, which API Blueprint does not offer. This allows developers to monitor the performance of their APIs in real-time and identify any issues or bottlenecks.
- Environment Variables and Scripts: Postman allows users to work with environment variables and write scripts for pre-request and post-request actions, a feature that is missing in API Blueprint. This enables developers to customize their requests and automate workflows more effectively.
In Summary, Postman offers a wider range of features such as protocol support, collaboration tools, mock servers, automation, monitoring, and scripting capabilities compared to API Blueprint.
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).
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.
I 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.
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 API Blueprint
- Easy to use1
- Ecosystem of tools1
Pros of Postman
- Easy to use490
- Great tool369
- Makes developing rest api's easy peasy276
- Easy setup, looks good156
- The best api workflow out there144
- It's the best53
- History feature53
- Adds real value to my workflow44
- Great interface that magically predicts your needs43
- The best in class app35
- Can save and share script12
- Fully featured without looking cluttered10
- Collections8
- Option to run scrips8
- Global/Environment Variables8
- Shareable Collections7
- Dead simple and useful. Excellent7
- Dark theme easy on the eyes7
- Awesome customer support6
- Great integration with newman6
- Documentation5
- Simple5
- The test script is useful5
- Saves responses4
- This has simplified my testing significantly4
- Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,34
- Easy as pie4
- API-network3
- I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis3
- Mocking API calls with predefined response3
- Now supports GraphQL2
- Postman Runner CI Integration2
- Easy to setup, test and provides test storage2
- Continuous integration using newman2
- Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable2
- Runner2
- Graph2
- <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>1
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Cons of API Blueprint
Cons of Postman
- Stores credentials in HTTP10
- Bloated features and UI9
- Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens8
- Poor GraphQL support7
- Expensive5
- Not free after 5 users3
- Can't prompt for per-request variables3
- Import swagger1
- Support websocket1
- Import curl1