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Postman vs OpenAPI: What are the differences?
What is Postman? Only complete API development environment. It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.
What is OpenAPI? Allows the owner of a network-accessible service to give universal access. It is a publicly available application programming interface that provides developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application or web service.
Postman and OpenAPI belong to "API Tools" category of the tech stack.
OpenAPI is an open source tool with 15.4K GitHub stars and 5.46K GitHub forks. Here's a link to OpenAPI's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, Postman has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2497 company stacks & 12250 developers stacks; compared to OpenAPI, which is listed in 3 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.
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 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.
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.
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 OpenAPI
Pros of Postman
- Easy to use488
- Great tool368
- Makes developing rest api's easy peasy275
- Easy setup, looks good155
- The best api workflow out there143
- History feature53
- It's the best53
- Adds real value to my workflow44
- Great interface that magically predicts your needs42
- The best in class app34
- Can save and share script11
- Fully featured without looking cluttered9
- Collections7
- Option to run scrips7
- Global/Environment Variables7
- Dead simple and useful. Excellent6
- Shareable Collections6
- Dark theme easy on the eyes6
- Awesome customer support5
- Great integration with newman5
- Simple4
- The test script is useful4
- Documentation4
- Easy as pie3
- Saves responses3
- Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,33
- This has simplified my testing significantly3
- API-network2
- I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis2
- Mocking API calls with predefined response2
- Easy to setup, test and provides test storage1
- Graph1
- Postman Runner CI Integration1
- Now supports GraphQL1
- Continuous integration using newman1
- Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable1
- <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>0
- Runner0
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Cons of OpenAPI
Cons of Postman
- Bloated features and UI9
- Stores credentials in HTTP9
- Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens8
- Poor GraphQL support7
- Expensive5
- Can't prompt for per-request variables3
- Not free after 5 users3
- Import curl1
- Import swagger1
- Support websocket1
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What is OpenAPI?
What is Postman?
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