Insomnia REST Client vs Paw vs Postman

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Insomnia REST Client

788
646
+ 1
44
Paw

230
277
+ 1
164
Postman

94K
80.6K
+ 1
1.8K

Insomnia REST Client vs Paw vs Postman: What are the differences?

Insomnia REST Client, Paw, and Postman are all popular tools used by developers and testers for testing and debugging APIs. Each tool has its own set of features and capabilities. In this document, we will discuss the key differences between Insomnia REST Client, Paw, and Postman.

  1. User Interface (UI): Insomnia REST Client, Paw, and Postman have different user interfaces. Insomnia REST Client has a clean and minimalistic interface, with a sidebar for organizing requests and a code editor-like request builder. Paw, on the other hand, has a more visually appealing interface with a sidebar for organizing requests and a request builder that resembles a flowchart. Postman has a similar interface to Paw, but with additional features like collections and workspaces.

  2. Authentication: Insomnia REST Client, Paw, and Postman support different types of authentication methods. Insomnia REST Client supports basic authentication, OAuth 2.0, and API key authentication. Paw supports basic authentication, HMAC authentication, OAuth 1.0, OAuth 2.0, and API key authentication. Postman supports basic authentication, OAuth 1.0, OAuth 2.0, and API key authentication, but also provides additional authentication methods like bearer token and digest authentication.

  3. Extensions/Plugins: Insomnia REST Client, Paw, and Postman have different levels of extensibility. Insomnia REST Client provides a plugin system that allows developers to add custom functionality and integrations with other tools. Paw supports plugins and extensions that can be used to enhance its capabilities. Postman also supports plugins and has a wide range of available plugins that offer additional functionality like data generators and testers.

  4. Collaboration and Syncing: Insomnia REST Client, Paw, and Postman have different collaboration and syncing capabilities. Insomnia REST Client and Paw provide collaboration features like sharing of request collections and environments with team members. Postman goes a step further and offers collaboration features like team workspaces and role-based access control. Additionally, Postman also provides syncing capabilities that allow users to sync their API collections and environments across different devices.

  5. Automation and Testing: Insomnia REST Client, Paw, and Postman all support automation and testing of APIs. Insomnia REST Client has a built-in support for writing tests using JavaScript, which can be helpful for automating API testing. Paw offers a code generation feature that allows users to generate code snippets in different programming languages for making API requests. Postman also supports tests using JavaScript, and provides a visual interface for creating tests and assertions.

  6. Price: Insomnia REST Client, Paw, and Postman have different pricing models. Insomnia REST Client is open-source and completely free to use. Paw has a free trial version, but it requires a license for full access to all features. Postman offers a free version with limited features, but also has paid versions with additional features and capabilities.

In summary, the key differences between Insomnia REST Client, Paw, and Postman lie in their user interfaces, authentication capabilities, extensions/plugins support, collaboration/syncing features, automation/testing capabilities, and pricing models.

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 · 390.7K 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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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
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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Decisions about Insomnia REST Client, Paw, and Postman
Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 1 upvote · 344.7K 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
  • 4
    Cross platform, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux
  • 3
    Opensource
  • 2
    Vim and Emacs key map
  • 2
    Preserves request templates
  • 0
    Does not have history feature
  • 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
  • 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
  • 53
    It's the best
  • 53
    History feature
  • 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
    Collections
  • 8
    Option to run scrips
  • 8
    Global/Environment Variables
  • 7
    Shareable Collections
  • 7
    Dead simple and useful. Excellent
  • 7
    Dark theme easy on the eyes
  • 6
    Awesome customer support
  • 6
    Great integration with newman
  • 5
    Documentation
  • 5
    Simple
  • 5
    The test script is useful
  • 4
    Saves responses
  • 4
    This has simplified my testing significantly
  • 4
    Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
  • 4
    Easy as pie
  • 3
    API-network
  • 3
    I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
  • 3
    Mocking API calls with predefined response
  • 2
    Now supports GraphQL
  • 2
    Postman Runner CI Integration
  • 2
    Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
  • 2
    Continuous integration using newman
  • 2
    Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
  • 2
    Runner
  • 2
    Graph
  • 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
    Not free after 5 users
  • 3
    Can't prompt for per-request variables
  • 1
    Import swagger
  • 1
    Support websocket
  • 1
    Import curl

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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.

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What tools integrate with Insomnia REST Client?
What tools integrate with Paw?
What tools integrate with Postman?
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