Overview

Postman

Stacks96.5K

Followers82.5K

Votes1.8K

Forks0

Paw

Stacks230

Followers277

Votes164

Insomnia REST Client

Stacks805

Followers652

Votes44

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Postman, Paw, Insomnia REST Client

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	Paw	Insomnia REST Client
It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.	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.	Insomnia is a powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication for Mac, Window, and Linux.
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	Organize your Requests, make Groups or sort by Host, Name, etc.;Easily build your requests, enjoy Formatters and Dynamic Values.;See Request and Response infos, headers, and body.;View formatted or raw HTTP Requests and Responses.;JSON Outline Viewer and Editor.;Paw supports OAuth 1 & 2, HTTP Basic Auth and Amazon S3;Paw generates ready-to-use client code	Mac, Windows and Linux;Data import/export;SSL client certificates;Response history;JSONPath and XPath;Preview rendered HTML;Multipart form;Query parameter editor;Configurable proxy;Cloud sync and sharing;Nunjucks templating;Filter requests;Toggle SSL validation;Keyboard shortcuts;Configurable timeout;HAR import;Usable at almost all sizes;Drag-n-drop organization;Responsive interface;Import from curl;
Statistics
GitHub Forks 0	GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 96.5K	Stacks 230	Stacks 805
Followers 82.5K	Followers 277	Followers 652
Votes 1.8K	Votes 164	Votes 44
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 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 Cons 3 It's not free 2 MacOS Only	Pros 16 Easy to work with 11 Great user interface 6 Works with GraphQL 4 Cross platform, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux 3 Opensource Cons 4 Do not have team sharing options 2 Do not store credentials in HTTP
Integrations
HipChat Keen Slack Dropbox Datadog PagerDuty Bigpanda Microsoft Teams Newman VictorOps	No integrations available	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Postman, Paw, Insomnia REST Client?

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

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.

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

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.

Read the Docs

It hosts documentation, making it fully searchable and easy to find. You can import your docs using any major version control system, including Mercurial, Git, Subversion, and Bazaar.