Insomnia REST Client vs Paw vs Postman

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

Insomnia REST Client

750
616
+ 1
40
Paw

215
274
+ 1
164
Postman

85.9K
72.9K
+ 1
1.8K
Advice on Insomnia REST Client, Paw, and Postman
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 · 338.8K views

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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Sadik Ay
Recommends
on
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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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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Decisions about Insomnia REST Client, Paw, and Postman
Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 1 upvote · 300.5K views

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 Insomnia REST Client
Pros of Paw
Pros of Postman
  • 16
    Easy to work with
  • 11
    Great user interface
  • 6
    Works with GraphQL
  • 3
    Cross platform, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux
  • 2
    Opensource
  • 2
    Preserves request templates
  • 0
    Does not have history feature
  • 0
    Vim and Emacs key map
  • 46
    Great interface
  • 37
    Easy to use
  • 25
    More stable and performant than the others
  • 16
    Saves endpoints list for testing
  • 13
    Supports environment variables
  • 12
    Integrations
  • 9
    Multi-Dimension Environment Settings
  • 4
    Paste curl commands into Paw
  • 2
    Creates code for any language or framework
  • 489
    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
  • 53
    History feature
  • 53
    It's the best
  • 44
    Adds real value to my workflow
  • 43
    Great interface that magically predicts your needs
  • 35
    The best in class app
  • 12
    Can save and share script
  • 10
    Fully featured without looking cluttered
  • 8
    Global/Environment Variables
  • 8
    Collections
  • 8
    Option to run scrips
  • 7
    Shareable Collections
  • 7
    Dead simple and useful. Excellent
  • 7
    Dark theme easy on the eyes
  • 6
    Great integration with newman
  • 6
    Awesome customer support
  • 5
    Simple
  • 5
    The test script is useful
  • 5
    Documentation
  • 4
    Saves responses
  • 4
    Easy as pie
  • 4
    Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
  • 4
    This has simplified my testing significantly
  • 3
    API-network
  • 3
    Mocking API calls with predefined response
  • 3
    I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
  • 2
    Runner
  • 2
    Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
  • 2
    Postman Runner CI Integration
  • 2
    Graph
  • 2
    Now supports GraphQL
  • 2
    Continuous integration using newman
  • 2
    Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
  • 1
    <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>

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Cons of Insomnia REST Client
Cons of Paw
Cons of Postman
  • 4
    Do not have team sharing options
  • 2
    Do not store credentials in HTTP
  • 3
    It's not free
  • 2
    MacOS Only
  • 10
    Stores credentials in HTTP
  • 9
    Bloated features and UI
  • 8
    Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
  • 7
    Poor GraphQL support
  • 5
    Expensive
  • 3
    Can't prompt for per-request variables
  • 3
    Not free after 5 users
  • 1
    Import swagger
  • 1
    Support websocket
  • 1
    Import curl

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

What is Insomnia REST Client?

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

What is 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.

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!

What companies use Insomnia REST Client?
What companies use Paw?
What companies use Postman?

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What tools integrate with Insomnia REST Client?
What tools integrate with Paw?
What tools integrate with Postman?
    No integrations found
      No integrations found

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      What are some alternatives to Insomnia REST Client, Paw, and Postman?
      RestSharp
      It is probably the most popular HTTP client library for .NET. Featuring automatic serialization and deserialization, request and response type detection, variety of authentications and other useful features
      OpenAPI
      It is a publicly available application programming interface that provides developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application or web service.
      Retrofit
      Retrofit turns your HTTP API into a Java interface
      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.
      Apigee
      API management, design, analytics, and security are at the heart of modern digital architecture. The Apigee intelligent API platform is a complete solution for moving business to the digital world.
      See all alternatives