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  5. IBM - API Connect vs Postman

IBM - API Connect vs Postman

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Postman
Postman
Stacks96.1K
Followers82.5K
Votes1.8K
Forks0
IBM API Connect
IBM API Connect
Stacks86
Followers133
Votes8

IBM - API Connect vs Postman: What are the differences?

Key differences between IBM - API Connect and Postman

IBM API Connect and Postman are two popular tools used by developers for working with APIs. While both tools have similar functions, they differ in several key aspects, including:

  1. Scalability and Integration: IBM API Connect offers a scalable platform that allows organizations to manage and connect multiple APIs seamlessly. It provides comprehensive integration capabilities and supports end-to-end API lifecycle management. On the other hand, Postman is primarily designed for individual developers and lacks the enterprise-level scalability and integration capabilities offered by IBM API Connect.

  2. Security and Governance: IBM API Connect offers robust security features, including authentication, authorization, and OAuth support. It allows API developers to define security policies and enforce them across the API ecosystem. Postman, although it provides some basic security features, doesn't have the same level of built-in security and governance capabilities as API Connect.

  3. Developer Portal and Documentation: IBM API Connect includes a self-service developer portal, which acts as a central hub for API documentation, tutorials, and code samples. It enables developers to discover, explore, and consume APIs easily. In contrast, while Postman does provide documentation capabilities, it lacks a dedicated developer portal, making it less user-friendly for API consumers.

  4. API Lifecycle Management: IBM API Connect offers a comprehensive set of tools and features to manage the entire lifecycle of APIs, including design, development, deployment, and versioning. It provides seamless integration with popular development tools and supports DevOps practices. In contrast, Postman primarily focuses on API testing and lacks the extensive lifecycle management capabilities provided by API Connect.

  5. Collaboration and Teamwork: IBM API Connect offers collaboration features that enable multiple developers and teams to work together on API development. It supports role-based access control, collaboration tools, and version control, allowing teams to collaborate seamlessly. Postman, on the other hand, is more suited for individual users and doesn't provide the same level of collaboration capabilities as API Connect.

  6. Analytics and Monitoring: IBM API Connect includes built-in analytics and monitoring capabilities, which provide real-time insights into API usage, performance, and health. It allows API providers to track API consumption, identify bottlenecks, and make data-driven decisions. Postman, while it does provide some basic monitoring features, lacks the comprehensive analytics and monitoring capabilities offered by API Connect.

In summary, IBM API Connect is an enterprise-grade API management solution that offers scalability, security, documentation, lifecycle management, collaboration, and analytics features. On the other hand, Postman is a lightweight API testing and development tool more suited for individual developers, lacking the enterprise-level features provided by API Connect.

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Advice on Postman, IBM API Connect

Jagdeep
Jagdeep

Tech Lead at Founder and Lightning

May 6, 2019

ReviewonPostmanPostman

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).

411k views411k
Comments
StackShare
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
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
Postman
IBM API Connect
IBM API Connect

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

It is a complete, modern, intuitive and scalable API platform that lets you create, securely expose, manage and monetize APIs across clouds so that you and your customers can power digital applications and spur innovation.

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
Create scalable and secure APIs for application servers, databases, enterprise service buses (ESB) and mainframes;Manage—create and manage portals that allow developers to quickly discover and consume APIs and securely access enterprise data, and monitor APIs to improve performance; Secure—Administrators can manage security and governance over APIs and the microservices. IT can set and enforce API policies to secure back-end information assets and comply with governance and regulatory mandates
Statistics
GitHub Forks
0
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
96.1K
Stacks
86
Followers
82.5K
Followers
133
Votes
1.8K
Votes
8
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
Pros
  • 6
    Innovated Approach, Super customer support
  • 2
    Secure API Management
Cons
  • 2
    Not open, no community research. No Trial download
Integrations
HipChat
HipChat
Keen
Keen
Slack
Slack
Dropbox
Dropbox
Datadog
Datadog
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Bigpanda
Bigpanda
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams
Newman
Newman
VictorOps
VictorOps
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Postman, IBM API Connect?

Swagger UI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 REST Client

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

RAML

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.

Docusaurus

Docusaurus

Docusaurus is a project for easily building, deploying, and maintaining open source project websites.

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