Insomnia REST Client vs Postman

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Insomnia REST Client

766
634
+ 1
40
Postman

88.8K
75.7K
+ 1
1.8K
Add tool

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.

Advice on Insomnia REST Client 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 · 354.6K 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 and Postman
Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 1 upvote · 314.3K 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 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
  • 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 Postman
  • 4
    Do not have team sharing options
  • 2
    Do not store credentials in HTTP
  • 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

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 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 Postman?
See which teams inside your own company are using Insomnia REST Client or Postman.
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What tools integrate with Insomnia REST Client?
What tools integrate with Postman?
    No integrations found

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    What are some alternatives to Insomnia REST Client and Postman?
    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.
    Soap UI
    It is an open source functional Testing tool for API Testing. It supports multiple protocols such as SOAP, REST, HTTP, JMS, AMF and JDBC. It supports functional tests, security tests, and virtualization.
    See all alternatives