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Insomnia REST Client vs Postman: What are the differences?
What is Insomnia REST Client? The most intuitive cross-platform REST API Client 😴. Insomnia is a powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication for Mac, Window, and Linux.
What is Postman? Only complete API development environment. Postman is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.
Insomnia REST Client and Postman can be categorized as "API" tools.
Some of the features offered by Insomnia REST Client are:
- Mac, Windows and Linux
- Data import/export
- SSL client certificates
On the other hand, Postman provides the following key features:
- Compact layout
- HTTP requests with file upload support
- Formatted API responses for JSON and XML
"Easy to work with" is the primary reason why developers consider Insomnia REST Client over the competitors, whereas "Easy to use" was stated as the key factor in picking Postman.
Insomnia REST Client is an open source tool with 10.2K GitHub stars and 590 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Insomnia REST Client's open source repository on GitHub.
Typeform, PedidosYa, and Swat.io are some of the popular companies that use Postman, whereas Insomnia REST Client is used by Digimedia ENVISION, 8villages, and Clippings. Postman has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1752 company stacks & 2232 developers stacks; compared to Insomnia REST Client, which is listed in 35 company stacks and 30 developer stacks.
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?"
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).
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.
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.
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.
Pros of Insomnia REST Client
- Easy to work with16
- Great user interface11
- Works with GraphQL6
- Cross platform, available for Mac, Windows, and Linux3
- Opensource2
- Preserves request templates2
- Does not have history feature0
- Vim and Emacs key map0
Pros of Postman
- Easy to use489
- Great tool369
- Makes developing rest api's easy peasy276
- Easy setup, looks good156
- The best api workflow out there144
- History feature53
- It's the best53
- Adds real value to my workflow44
- Great interface that magically predicts your needs43
- The best in class app35
- Can save and share script12
- Fully featured without looking cluttered10
- Global/Environment Variables8
- Collections8
- Option to run scrips8
- Shareable Collections7
- Dead simple and useful. Excellent7
- Dark theme easy on the eyes7
- Great integration with newman6
- Awesome customer support6
- Simple5
- The test script is useful5
- Documentation5
- Saves responses4
- Easy as pie4
- Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,34
- This has simplified my testing significantly4
- API-network3
- Mocking API calls with predefined response3
- I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis3
- Runner2
- Easy to setup, test and provides test storage2
- Postman Runner CI Integration2
- Graph2
- Now supports GraphQL2
- Continuous integration using newman2
- Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable2
- <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>1
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Cons of Insomnia REST Client
- Do not have team sharing options4
- Do not store credentials in HTTP2
Cons of Postman
- Stores credentials in HTTP10
- Bloated features and UI9
- Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens8
- Poor GraphQL support7
- Expensive5
- Not free after 5 users3
- Can't prompt for per-request variables3
- Import swagger1
- Support websocket1
- Import curl1
