Overview

Postman

Stacks96.5K

Followers82.5K

Votes1.8K

Forks0

Fiddler

Stacks113

Followers123

Votes0

Fiddler vs Postman: What are the differences?

Fiddler and Postman are two widely used tools in the realm of API testing and development. Let's delve into the key distinctions between these two tools.

Installation Process: Fiddler necessitates a standalone installation, deploying its own application that needs to be installed on the user's machine. It provides a comprehensive set of features, including traffic capturing and analysis. Postman, on the other hand, is a cloud-based platform with an additional option for a desktop application. Users can access Postman through their web browser or install the desktop version based on their preferences.
User Interface and Workflow: Fiddler offers a desktop application with a robust and feature-rich user interface, catering to advanced users who require in-depth traffic monitoring and analysis capabilities. Postman provides a user-friendly interface with a focus on simplifying the API testing and development workflow. Its clean and intuitive design appeals to both beginners and experienced developers.
Request Building and Customization: Fiddler allows users to manually construct HTTP requests and inspect responses. It offers advanced customization options, making it suitable for intricate scenarios and detailed request/response analysis. Postman, while also supporting manual request building, excels in providing a visual and intuitive way to create and customize requests through its user-friendly interface, making it accessible for users with varying technical backgrounds.
Collaboration and Sharing: Fiddler primarily operates on a local machine, limiting collaborative features. Sharing captured traffic or analysis typically requires exporting and sharing files. Postman, being a cloud-based platform, facilitates collaboration by allowing users to share and collaborate on API collections. It provides features for team collaboration, making it easy to work on API development projects collectively.
Automation and Scripting: Fiddler supports scripting and automation through the FiddlerScript language, allowing users to create custom rules and automate certain tasks. Postman offers a powerful scripting environment using JavaScript, enabling users to automate API tests, set up pre-request scripts, and define complex workflows within the tool.
Integration and Ecosystem: Fiddler integrates with various third-party tools and extensions, enhancing its functionality based on user needs. It provides a versatile ecosystem for extending capabilities. Postman boasts an extensive ecosystem with support for a wide range of integrations, including CI/CD pipelines, version control, and collaboration platforms, providing a seamless development experience.

In summary, Fiddler empowers you to dissect and manipulate API traffic, while Postman helps you design, test, and document APIs efficiently.

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Advice on Postman, Fiddler

Jagdeep

Tech Lead at Founder and Lightning

May 6, 2019

Reviewon

Postman

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).

410k views410k

Comments

StackShare

May 1, 2019

Needs advice

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?"

382k views382k

Comments

Stephen

Artificial Intelligence Fellow

Feb 4, 2020

Decided

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.

361k views361k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Postman	Fiddler
It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.	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.
Compact layout;HTTP requests with file upload support;Formatted API responses for JSON and XML;Image previews;Request history;Basic Auth, OAuth 1.0, OAuth 2.0, and other common auth helpers;Autocomplete for URL and header values;Key/value editors for adding parameters or header values. Works for URL parameters too.;Use environment variables to easily shift between settings. Great for testing production, staging or local setups.;Keyboard shortcuts to maximize your productivity;Automatically generated web documentation;Mock servers hosted on Postman’s cloud;API monitoring run from Postman cloud	-
Statistics
GitHub Forks 0	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 96.5K	Stacks 113
Followers 82.5K	Followers 123
Votes 1.8K	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 490 Easy to use 369 Great tool 276 Makes developing rest api's easy peasy 156 Easy setup, looks good 144 The best api workflow out there Cons 10 Stores credentials in HTTP 9 Bloated features and UI 8 Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens 7 Poor GraphQL support 5 Expensive	No community feedback yet
Integrations
HipChat Keen Slack Dropbox Datadog PagerDuty Bigpanda Microsoft Teams Newman VictorOps	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Postman, Fiddler?

Swagger UI

Swagger UI is a dependency-free collection of HTML, Javascript, and CSS assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation and sandbox from a Swagger-compliant API

Paw

Paw is a full-featured and beautifully designed Mac app that makes interaction with REST services delightful. Either you are an API maker or consumer, Paw helps you build HTTP requests, inspect the server's response and even generate client code.

Apiary

It takes more than a simple HTML page to thrill your API users. The right tools take weeks of development. Weeks that apiary.io saves.

Karate DSL

Combines API test-automation, mocks and performance-testing into a single, unified framework. The BDD syntax popularized by Cucumber is language-neutral, and easy for even non-programmers. Besides powerful JSON & XML assertions, you can run tests in parallel for speed - which is critical for HTTP API testing.

ReadMe.io

It is an easy-to-use tool to help you build out documentation! Each documentation site that you publish is a project where there is space for documentation, interactive API reference guides, a changelog, and much more.

Appwrite

Appwrite's open-source platform lets you add Auth, DBs, Functions and Storage to your product and build any application at any scale, own your data, and use your preferred coding languages and tools.

Runscope

Keep tabs on all aspects of your API's performance with uptime monitoring, integration testing, logging and real-time monitoring.

Insomnia REST Client

Insomnia is a powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication for Mac, Window, and Linux.

RAML

RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML) makes it easy to manage the whole API lifecycle from design to sharing. It's concise - you only write what you need to define - and reusable. It is machine readable API design that is actually human friendly.