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  5. Postman vs ngrok

Postman vs ngrok

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

ngrok
ngrok
Stacks420
Followers457
Votes57
GitHub Stars24.4K
Forks4.3K
Postman
Postman
Stacks96.1K
Followers82.5K
Votes1.8K
Forks0

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.
  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

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Advice on ngrok, Postman

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

ngrok
ngrok
Postman
Postman

ngrok is a reverse proxy that creates a secure tunnel between from a public endpoint to a locally running web service. ngrok captures and analyzes all traffic over the tunnel for later inspection and replay.

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

Expose any http service behind a NAT or firewall to the internet on a subdomain of ngrok.com;Expose any tcp service behind a NAT or firewall to the internet on a random port of ngrok.com;Inspect all http requests/responses that are transmitted over the tunnel;Replay any request that was transmitted over the tunnel
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
Statistics
GitHub Stars
24.4K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
4.3K
GitHub Forks
0
Stacks
420
Stacks
96.1K
Followers
457
Followers
82.5K
Votes
57
Votes
1.8K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 26
    Easy to use
  • 11
    Super-fast
  • 7
    Free
  • 6
    Awesome traffic analysis page
  • 5
    Reliable custom domains
Cons
  • 5
    Doesn't Support UDP
  • 1
    El tunel SSH cambia de dominio constantemente
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
Integrations
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
GitHub
GitHub
Slack
Slack
HipChat
HipChat
Keen
Keen
Slack
Slack
Dropbox
Dropbox
Datadog
Datadog
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Bigpanda
Bigpanda
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams
Newman
Newman
VictorOps
VictorOps

What are some alternatives to ngrok, Postman?

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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