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Postman vs ngrok: What are the differences?
Postman and ngrok are both popular tools used in web development. Postman is an API testing and documentation platform, while ngrok is a secure tunneling tool that allows localhost development to be accessed from anywhere.
Supported Features: Postman is primarily focused on API testing and offers a wide range of features for this purpose. It allows users to send requests, manage environments and variables, and automate workflows. On the other hand, ngrok focuses on creating secure tunnels to expose localhost to the internet, making it easier to test webhooks and other internet-facing functionalities.
API Documentation: Postman provides a comprehensive platform for documenting APIs, allowing developers to create detailed documentation with ease. It includes features such as interactive documentation, example responses, and the ability to share documentation with other team members. In contrast, ngrok does not provide specific features for API documentation.
Authentication and Authorization: Postman offers various authentication methods such as OAuth, API keys, and JWT tokens. It allows developers to easily set up and manage authentication for their APIs. Ngrok, on the other hand, does not provide built-in authentication and authorization mechanisms. It focuses more on tunneling functionality rather than authentication.
Collaboration and Teamwork: Postman includes collaboration features that allow team members to work together on API development and testing. It allows for sharing of collections, environments, and documentation with other team members. Ngrok, on the other hand, does not offer specific collaboration features. It is more oriented towards individual developers and their local development environments.
Pricing and Usage: Postman offers both free and paid plans, with the paid plans providing additional features such as team collaboration and advanced request features. On the other hand, ngrok has a free plan that provides basic functionality but restricts certain features to paid plans. The pricing and usage models of the two tools differ based on their specific offerings.
Network Configuration: Ngrok simplifies the process of creating secure tunnels by handling the network configuration automatically. It eliminates the need for manual port forwarding or opening firewall settings. Postman, on the other hand, requires the proper network configuration to establish connections and send requests to APIs.
In summary, Postman and ngrok have key differences in their supported features, API documentation capabilities, authentication and authorization mechanisms, collaboration and teamwork functionalities, pricing and usage models, and network configuration requirements.
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 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.
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.
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 ngrok
- Easy to use26
- Super-fast11
- Free7
- Awesome traffic analysis page6
- Reliable custom domains5
- Mobile development1
- Shares service-wide metrics1
- Supports UTP And HTTPS0
Pros of Postman
- Easy to use490
- Great tool369
- Makes developing rest api's easy peasy276
- Easy setup, looks good156
- The best api workflow out there144
- It's the best53
- History feature53
- 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
- Collections8
- Option to run scrips8
- Global/Environment Variables8
- Shareable Collections7
- Dead simple and useful. Excellent7
- Dark theme easy on the eyes7
- Awesome customer support6
- Great integration with newman6
- Documentation5
- Simple5
- The test script is useful5
- Saves responses4
- This has simplified my testing significantly4
- Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,34
- Easy as pie4
- API-network3
- I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis3
- Mocking API calls with predefined response3
- Now supports GraphQL2
- Postman Runner CI Integration2
- Easy to setup, test and provides test storage2
- Continuous integration using newman2
- Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable2
- Runner2
- Graph2
- <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>1
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Cons of ngrok
- Doesn't Support UDP5
- El tunel SSH cambia de dominio constantemente1
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