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Charles vs Postman: What are the differences?
Charles is a web debugging proxy tool that allows you to intercept and analyze HTTP and HTTPS traffic. On the other hand, Postman is a user-friendly tool to test and interact with APIs. Let's explore the key differences between Charles and Postman:
Proxy Functionality: Charles is primarily designed as a web debugging proxy tool that allows developers to intercept, view, and manipulate network traffic between a client and a server. It provides comprehensive features for capturing and analyzing HTTP/HTTPS requests and responses. Postman, on the other hand, is an API client tool that focuses on creating, sending, and testing API requests. While Postman includes some proxy functionality, it is not as extensive or specialized as Charles in this regard.
GUI and User Experience: Charles provides a dedicated desktop application with a feature-rich graphical user interface (GUI). It offers advanced features like request/response inspection, SSL proxying, request recording, and more. Postman also provides a GUI but has a stronger emphasis on API testing and collaboration. Its interface is designed to facilitate the creation and management of API requests, offering features like request organization, environment variables, test scripting, and team collaboration tools.
API Testing and Workflow: Postman provides features like automated testing with assertions, variable substitution, test result reporting, and collection sharing for collaborative testing. Postman's GUI is optimized for managing and executing API requests, making it a comprehensive tool for API development and testing workflows. Charles, on the other hand, is more focused on network debugging and capturing traffic, making it ideal for troubleshooting network-related issues but with less emphasis on API-specific testing and workflow management.
Pricing and Licensing: Charles is a commercial tool with a one-time license fee for usage. It offers a trial version with limited functionality and a licensed version with full features. Postman provides both free and paid versions, with the paid version offering additional features and team collaboration capabilities. The free version of Postman is suitable for individual developers, while the paid version caters to larger teams with advanced testing and collaboration requirements.
In summary, Charles is primarily a web debugging proxy tool that specializes in intercepting and analyzing network traffic, while Postman is a comprehensive API client with extensive testing and collaboration features.
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 Charles
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 Charles
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
