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  5. KrakenD vs Postman

KrakenD vs Postman

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Postman
Postman
Stacks96.1K
Followers82.5K
Votes1.8K
Forks0
KrakenD
KrakenD
Stacks59
Followers158
Votes9

KrakenD vs Postman: What are the differences?

  1. Deployment Mode: KrakenD is designed to be deployed as a reverse proxy, while Postman is primarily used as a testing tool for APIs. This means that KrakenD is suitable for production environments where it can manage, route, and optimize API requests, while Postman is more focused on providing a platform for testing and debugging APIs.

  2. Ease of Use: Postman offers a user-friendly interface with features like a built-in HTTP client, automated testing, and collaboration tools, making it suitable for developers regardless of their technical expertise. On the other hand, KrakenD requires more configuration and setup to deploy as a reverse proxy, targeting more experienced users and system administrators.

  3. Functionality: KrakenD primarily focuses on high-performance API gateway capabilities, including caching, rate limiting, load balancing, and routing, making it a robust solution for managing API traffic. Postman, on the other hand, is more centered on testing APIs, offering features like test automation, monitoring, and request collection organization.

  4. Customization: KrakenD provides extensive customization options through its configuration files, allowing users to fine-tune routing rules, middleware, plugins, and other settings to optimize API performance. Postman, while customizable to some extent, is more limited in terms of advanced customization options compared to KrakenD.

  5. Cost: KrakenD is an open-source project, making it a cost-effective solution for organizations looking to deploy a powerful API gateway without investing in commercial software. Postman, on the other hand, offers a free version with limited features, with additional paid plans for organizations requiring more advanced functionalities and collaboration tools.

  6. Scalability: KrakenD is built with scalability in mind, supporting horizontal scaling to handle increased API traffic and ensuring high availability. Postman, while capable of scaling to an extent, is more oriented towards individual developers and smaller teams, lacking the robust scalability features found in enterprise-grade API gateway solutions like KrakenD.

In Summary, KrakenD and Postman differ in deployment mode, ease of use, functionality, customization, cost, and scalability, catering to different use cases and user requirements in the API management space.

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Advice on Postman, KrakenD

Jagdeep
Jagdeep

Tech Lead at Founder and Lightning

May 6, 2019

ReviewonPostmanPostman

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).

411k views411k
Comments
StackShare
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
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
Postman
KrakenD
KrakenD

It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.

Its core functionality is to create an API that acts as an aggregator of many microservices into single endpoints, doing the heavy-lifting automatically for you: aggregate, transform, filter, decode, throttle, auth and more.

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
Throttling and usage quotas; Extensible architecture; Circuit breaker; High-load and burst; Service discovery
Statistics
GitHub Forks
0
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
96.1K
Stacks
59
Followers
82.5K
Followers
158
Votes
1.8K
Votes
9
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
  • 2
    Best performant
  • 2
    Documentation
  • 2
    Stateless
  • 1
    Easiest to install
  • 1
    Easy to install
Integrations
HipChat
HipChat
Keen
Keen
Slack
Slack
Dropbox
Dropbox
Datadog
Datadog
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Bigpanda
Bigpanda
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams
Newman
Newman
VictorOps
VictorOps
Keycloak
Keycloak
Docker
Docker
Auth0
Auth0
ELK
ELK
Logstash
Logstash
Grafana
Grafana
Kibana
Kibana
RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ
Amazon SQS
Amazon SQS
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
Google Cloud Pub/Sub

What are some alternatives to Postman, KrakenD?

Swagger UI

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

Paw

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.

Apiary

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

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

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

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

Runscope

Keep tabs on all aspects of your API's performance with uptime monitoring, integration testing, logging and real-time monitoring.

Insomnia REST Client

Insomnia REST Client

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

RAML

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

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

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