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UPDATED
May 19, 2022

Charles vs Postman

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Charles
128
136
+ 1
0
Postman
72.3K
60K
+ 1
1.8K
Add tool

Charles vs Postman: What are the differences?

What is Charles? HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy. Charles is a web proxy (HTTP Proxy / HTTP Monitor) that runs on your own computer. Your web browser (or any other Internet application) is then configured to access the Internet through Charles, and Charles is then able to record and display for you all of the data that is sent and received.

What is Postman? 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.

Charles and Postman can be categorized as "API" tools.

Some of the features offered by Charles are:

  • SSL Proxying – view SSL requests and responses in plain text
  • Bandwidth Throttling to simulate slower Internet connections including latency
  • AJAX debugging – view XML and JSON requests and responses as a tree or as text

On the other hand, Postman provides the following key features:

  • Compact layout
  • HTTP requests with file upload support
  • Formatted API responses for JSON and XML

According to the StackShare community, Postman has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1752 company stacks & 2232 developers stacks; compared to Charles, which is listed in 16 company stacks and 13 developer stacks.

Advice on Charles and Postman
StackShare Editors
| 5 upvotes · 216.4K views
Needs advice
on
PostmanPostmanApiaryApiary
and
Swagger UISwagger UI

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?"

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Replies (3)
Jagdeep Singh
Tech Lead at ucreate.it · | 8 upvotes · 244.3K views
Recommends
PostmanPostman
at

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).

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Jadenko
| 2 upvotes · 232.6K views
Recommends
Swagger UISwagger UI
at

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.

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Sadik Ay
Backend Engineer · | 2 upvotes · 215.7K views
Recommends
PostmanPostman

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.

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Decisions about Charles and Postman
dakotamcinnis
| 7 upvotes · 7.8K views
Chose
OpenAPIOpenAPI
over
PostmanPostman
at
()

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.

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Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 1 upvote · 218.3K views
Chose
PostmanPostman
over
Insomnia REST ClientInsomnia REST Client

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.

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Pros of Charles
Pros of Postman
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 486
      Easy to use
    • 369
      Great tool
    • 275
      Makes developing rest api's easy peasy
    • 156
      Easy setup, looks good
    • 143
      The best api workflow out there
    • 53
      History feature
    • 53
      It's the best
    • 44
      Adds real value to my workflow
    • 42
      Great interface that magically predicts your needs
    • 34
      The best in class app
    • 11
      Can save and share script
    • 9
      Fully featured without looking cluttered
    • 7
      Option to run scrips
    • 7
      Collections
    • 7
      Global/Environment Variables
    • 6
      Dark theme easy on the eyes
    • 6
      Shareable Collections
    • 6
      Dead simple and useful. Excellent
    • 5
      Great integration with newman
    • 5
      Awesome customer support
    • 4
      Documentation
    • 4
      The test script is useful
    • 4
      Simple
    • 3
      This has simplified my testing significantly
    • 3
      Easy as pie
    • 3
      Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
    • 3
      Saves responses
    • 2
      API-network
    • 2
      Mocking API calls with predefined response
    • 2
      I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
    • 1
      Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
    • 1
      Graph
    • 1
      Postman Runner CI Integration
    • 1
      Now supports GraphQL
    • 1
      Continuous integration using newman
    • 1
      Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
    • 0
      Runner
    • 0
      <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>

    Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

    Cons of Charles
    Cons of Postman
      Be the first to leave a con
      • 9
        Stores credentials in HTTP
      • 7
        Poor GraphQL support
      • 7
        Bloated features and UI
      • 7
        Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
      • 3
        Expensive
      • 2
        Not free after 5 users
      • 2
        Can't prompt for per-request variables
      • 1
        Support websocket
      • 1
        Import curl
      • 1
        Import swagger

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      What is Charles?

      Charles is a web proxy (HTTP Proxy / HTTP Monitor) that runs on your own computer. Your web browser (or any other Internet application) is then configured to access the Internet through Charles, and Charles is then able to record and display for you all of the data that is sent and received.

      What is Postman?

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

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

      Jobs that mention Charles and Postman as a desired skillset
      Technical Lead, (Frontend) Labs
      Postman
      View Job Details
      SchedulePostman+2
      Software Engineer, (Infrastructure) Developer Productivity And Tools
      Postman
      View Job Details
      ScheduleEsbuildBabel+9
      Technical Lead, (Frontend) Flows
      Postman
      US
      View Job Details
      ScheduleCollectDID+9
      Principal Developer Advocate
      Postman
      US
      View Job Details
      ageChannelsPostman+3
      Software Engineer (Fullstack), Labs
      Postman
      View Job Details
      ScheduleKnitPostman+3
      Software Engineer, (Frontend) API Mock
      Postman
      View Job Details
      ScheduleSimplePostman+5
      Software Engineer, (Backend) Identity and Access Management
      Postman
      View Job Details
      ScheduleOAuth2Postman+5
      Software Engineer II, (Fullstack) Product Trust
      Postman
      View Job Details
      ScheduleTypeScriptPostman+6
      What companies use Charles?
      What companies use Postman?
      See which teams inside your own company are using Charles or Postman.
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      Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

      What tools integrate with Charles?
      What tools integrate with Postman?
        No integrations found

        Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

        What are some alternatives to Charles and Postman?
        Fiddler
        It is a free web debugging proxy for any browser, system or platform. It helps you debug web applications by capturing network traffic between the Internet and test computers. The tool enables you to inspect incoming and outgoing data to monitor and modify requests and responses before the browser receives them.
        Amazon API Gateway
        Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.
        Insomnia REST Client
        Insomnia is a powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication for Mac, Window, and Linux.
        OpenAPI
        It is a publicly available application programming interface that provides developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application or web service.
        OpenAPI Specification
        It defines a standard, language-agnostic interface to RESTful APIs which allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of the service without access to source code, documentation, or through network traffic inspection.
        See all alternatives

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