Paw vs Postman

Overview

Postman

Stacks96.1K

Followers82.5K

Votes1.8K

Forks0

Paw

Stacks233

Followers277

Votes164

Paw vs Postman: What are the differences?

Paw is an HTTP client that lets you test and describe the APIs you build or consume, while Postman is a tool primarily used for testing and debugging APIs. Let's explore the key differences between Paw and Postman:

User Interface and Experience: Paw provides a sidebar-based layout where users can define requests, headers, parameters, and authentication settings. Paw emphasizes a more visual approach to API development, allowing users to build requests by dragging and dropping elements and visually configuring dynamic values. Postman, on the other hand, provides a comprehensive user interface with a tabbed layout that enables users to organize and manage collections, environments, requests, and tests.
Request Composition and Configuration: Paw offers powerful request composition capabilities and automatic code generation in multiple programming languages. It provides support for dynamic values and scripting. Postman provides a more straightforward request building experience with a user-friendly interface for defining headers, parameters, authentication, and request bodies. It also includes pre-request and post-request scripts for customizing the request behavior and response handling.
Collaboration and Sharing: Postman excels in collaboration and sharing features, making it a popular choice for teams. It allows users to create and join teams, share collections, environments, and tests, and collaborate on API development and testing. Paw, on the other hand, primarily focuses on individual developers and does not offer the same level of collaboration and sharing features. It is designed to support personal API development workflows without extensive team collaboration capabilities.
Ecosystem and Integrations: Postman has a vibrant ecosystem and extensive integrations with popular development tools and services. It offers integrations for source control, CI/CD, test automation, and more. Postman also has a large community and a marketplace for sharing collections and plugins. Paw, on the other hand, has a more limited ecosystem and integrations. While it provides some integrations and supports importing/exporting various formats, it may not have the same level of integration options as Postman.

In summary, Paw offers a visually oriented, user-friendly experience with powerful request composition and code generation features. Postman provides a comprehensive platform with a wide range of features, strong collaboration capabilities, and a vibrant ecosystem.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Postman, Paw

Jagdeep

Tech Lead at Founder and Lightning

May 6, 2019

Reviewon

Postman

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

dakotamcinnis

Oct 12, 2021

Decided

OpenAPI is an excellent tool for creating interactive and hosted documents when releasing an API to the public. We will leverage this, specifically for the public facing APIs that customers can integrate into (to automate creating projects and storing experiment data). Postman is more complicated to share with others and is not as rich for documentation.

19.6k views19.6k

Comments

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	Paw
It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.	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.
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	Organize your Requests, make Groups or sort by Host, Name, etc.;Easily build your requests, enjoy Formatters and Dynamic Values.;See Request and Response infos, headers, and body.;View formatted or raw HTTP Requests and Responses.;JSON Outline Viewer and Editor.;Paw supports OAuth 1 & 2, HTTP Basic Auth and Amazon S3;Paw generates ready-to-use client code
Statistics
GitHub Forks 0	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 96.1K	Stacks 233
Followers 82.5K	Followers 277
Votes 1.8K	Votes 164
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 46 Great interface 37 Easy to use 25 More stable and performant than the others 16 Saves endpoints list for testing 13 Supports environment variables Cons 3 It's not free 2 MacOS Only
Integrations
HipChat Keen Slack Dropbox Datadog PagerDuty Bigpanda Microsoft Teams Newman VictorOps	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Postman, Paw?

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

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

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

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'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

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

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

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

Apigee

API management, design, analytics, and security are at the heart of modern digital architecture. The Apigee intelligent API platform is a complete solution for moving business to the digital world.

Related Comparisons

User Interface and Experience: Paw provides a sidebar-based layout where users can define requests, headers, parameters, and authentication settings. Paw emphasizes a more visual approach to API development, allowing users to build requests by dragging and dropping elements and visually configuring dynamic values. Postman, on the other hand, provides a comprehensive user interface with a tabbed layout that enables users to organize and manage collections, environments, requests, and tests.
Request Composition and Configuration: Paw offers powerful request composition capabilities and automatic code generation in multiple programming languages. It provides support for dynamic values and scripting. Postman provides a more straightforward request building experience with a user-friendly interface for defining headers, parameters, authentication, and request bodies. It also includes pre-request and post-request scripts for customizing the request behavior and response handling.
Collaboration and Sharing: Postman excels in collaboration and sharing features, making it a popular choice for teams. It allows users to create and join teams, share collections, environments, and tests, and collaborate on API development and testing. Paw, on the other hand, primarily focuses on individual developers and does not offer the same level of collaboration and sharing features. It is designed to support personal API development workflows without extensive team collaboration capabilities.
Ecosystem and Integrations: Postman has a vibrant ecosystem and extensive integrations with popular development tools and services. It offers integrations for source control, CI/CD, test automation, and more. Postman also has a large community and a marketplace for sharing collections and plugins. Paw, on the other hand, has a more limited ecosystem and integrations. While it provides some integrations and supports importing/exporting various formats, it may not have the same level of integration options as Postman.

Paw vs Postman