Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
APItools vs Postman vs Restlet Studio: What are the differences?
Introduction:
APItools, Postman, and Restlet Studio are popular tools used by developers and teams to test, monitor, and manage APIs efficiently.
User Interface: Postman offers a user-friendly interface with features like collections, environments, and tests, making it easy to organize and execute API requests. Restlet Studio also provides a visually appealing interface with drag-and-drop capabilities, whereas APItools has a more basic user interface which may not be as visually appealing.
Collaboration: Postman allows for easy collaboration among team members through features like shared collections and workspaces. Restlet Studio also enables collaboration through shared projects and templates, while APItools may not have as robust collaboration features.
Automation: Postman allows for automated testing and monitoring of APIs through scripts and Newman tool integration. Restlet Studio also supports automation through testing scenarios and scheduling, while APItools may have limitations in terms of automation capabilities.
Documentation: Postman enables developers to create detailed API documentation with collection descriptions, request examples, and response schemas. Restlet Studio also provides API documentation generation with interactive diagrams and explanations, whereas APItools may have a more straightforward documentation approach.
Mock Servers: Postman allows for the creation of mock servers to simulate API responses for testing purposes. Restlet Studio also supports mock server generation for API testing and prototyping, whereas APItools may not have as robust mock server capabilities.
Security: Postman offers features for API security testing, including OAuth authentication and SSL certificate verification. Restlet Studio also provides security testing options like CSRF protection and encryption, while APItools may have fewer built-in security testing tools.
In Summary, Postman, Restlet Studio, and APItools differ in user interface design, collaboration capabilities, automation features, documentation options, mock server support, and security testing tools.
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.
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.
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 APItools
- Flexibility3
- Price (free)2
- Easy setup1
- Powerful1
- Easy way of debugging apps1
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
Pros of Restlet Studio
- Powerful & intuitive API designer1
- GitHub Integration1
- Easy to used0
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of APItools
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
Cons of Restlet Studio
- Opaque Pricing Model0