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  5. Locust vs Postman

Locust vs Postman

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Postman
Postman
Stacks96.1K
Followers82.5K
Votes1.8K
Forks0
Locust
Locust
Stacks191
Followers317
Votes51
GitHub Stars27.0K
Forks3.1K

Locust vs Postman: What are the differences?

Locust and Postman are two popular tools used in API testing. While both tools serve the same purpose, they have some key differences that set them apart.
  1. Architecture: Locust is a distributed and scalable tool that allows the simulation of thousands of concurrent users, making it suitable for load testing. On the other hand, Postman is a single-user tool designed for manual and automated API testing, focusing more on the functional testing aspect.

  2. Testing Approach: Locust follows a behavior-driven testing approach, where test scenarios are defined using Python code. It allows the creation of complex test scenarios with custom user behavior. In contrast, Postman uses a request-driven approach, where tests are created by sending HTTP requests and validating the responses. It provides a user-friendly interface for designing and running tests.

  3. Scripting Capabilities: Locust provides complete flexibility in scripting and customizing user behavior. It allows the use of Python code to define tasks, user actions, and request parameters. Postman, on the other hand, also supports scripting but uses JavaScript instead of Python. The scripting capabilities in Postman are more limited compared to Locust.

  4. Load Generation: Locust is designed specifically for load testing and distributed load generation. It can spawn thousands of virtual users on multiple machines, simulating realistic load scenarios. Postman, though capable of handling multiple requests simultaneously, is not specifically optimized for high-scale load testing. It is more suitable for functional testing and integration testing.

  5. Reporting and Analysis: Locust provides real-time monitoring and reporting of performance metrics such as response times, failure rates, and throughput. It also offers integration with various monitoring and analysis tools. Postman, on the other hand, provides limited reporting and analysis features. It offers basic reporting on test results but lacks advanced performance monitoring capabilities.

  6. Collaboration and Team Features: Postman provides extensive features for collaboration and team-based API testing. It allows team members to share and collaborate on collections, APIs, and test scripts. It also provides features like version control, team libraries, and API documentation. Locust, being primarily focused on load testing, lacks the built-in collaboration and team features offered by Postman.

In Summary, Locust is a scalable tool for load testing with powerful scripting capabilities, while Postman is a user-friendly tool for functional testing with collaboration features.

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Advice on Postman, Locust

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
Rashmi
Rashmi

Mar 17, 2021

Needs adviceonJenkinsJenkinsGatlingGatlingLocustLocust

I am looking for a performance testing tool that I can use for testing the documents accessed by many users simultaneously. I also want to integrate Jenkins with the performance automation tool. I am not able to decide which shall I choose Gatling or Locust. But for me, Jenkins integration is important. I am looking for suggestions for this scenario.

104k views104k
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

Detailed Comparison

Postman
Postman
Locust
Locust

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

Locust is an easy-to-use, distributed, user load testing tool. Intended for load testing web sites (or other systems) and figuring out how many concurrent users a system can handle.

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
Define user behaviour in code;Distributed & scalable;Proven & battle tested
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
27.0K
GitHub Forks
0
GitHub Forks
3.1K
Stacks
96.1K
Stacks
191
Followers
82.5K
Followers
317
Votes
1.8K
Votes
51
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
  • 15
    Hackable
  • 11
    Supports distributed
  • 7
    Open source
  • 6
    Easy to setup
  • 6
    Easy to use
Cons
  • 1
    Bad design
Integrations
HipChat
HipChat
Keen
Keen
Slack
Slack
Dropbox
Dropbox
Datadog
Datadog
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Bigpanda
Bigpanda
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams
Newman
Newman
VictorOps
VictorOps
Python
Python

What are some alternatives to Postman, Locust?

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.

k6

k6

It is a developer centric open source load testing tool for testing the performance of your backend infrastructure. It’s built with Go and JavaScript to integrate well into your development workflow.

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.

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