StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Utilities
  3. API Tools
  4. API Tools
  5. Paw vs Retrofit

Paw vs Retrofit

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Paw
Paw
Stacks233
Followers277
Votes164
Retrofit
Retrofit
Stacks386
Followers198
Votes0
GitHub Stars43.8K
Forks7.3K

Paw vs Retrofit: What are the differences?

Paw: The ultimate REST client for Mac. 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; Retrofit: A type-safe HTTP client for Android and Java. Retrofit turns your HTTP API into a Java interface.

Paw and Retrofit can be primarily classified as "API" tools.

Some of the features offered by Paw are:

  • 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.

On the other hand, Retrofit provides the following key features:

  • URL parameter replacement and query parameter support
  • Object conversion to request body (e.g., JSON, protocol buffers)
  • Multipart request body and file upload

Retrofit is an open source tool with 33K GitHub stars and 6.13K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Retrofit's open source repository on GitHub.

Swat.io, Pubu, and PlanHW are some of the popular companies that use Paw, whereas Retrofit is used by Square, Robinhood, and Samba Tech. Paw has a broader approval, being mentioned in 17 company stacks & 12 developers stacks; compared to Retrofit, which is listed in 19 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.

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)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

Paw
Paw
Retrofit
Retrofit

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.

Retrofit turns your HTTP API into a Java interface

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
URL parameter replacement and query parameter support; Object conversion to request body (e.g., JSON, protocol buffers); Multipart request body and file upload
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
43.8K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
7.3K
Stacks
233
Stacks
386
Followers
277
Followers
198
Votes
164
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
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
No community feedback yet

What are some alternatives to Paw, Retrofit?

Postman

Postman

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

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.

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.

Apigee

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.

Hoppscotch

Hoppscotch

It is a free, fast and beautiful API request builder. It helps you create requests faster, saving precious time on development

Falcor

Falcor

Falcor lets you represent all your remote data sources as a single domain model via a virtual JSON graph. You code the same way no matter where the data is, whether in memory on the client or over the network on the server.

DuckRails

DuckRails

DuckRails is an open source development tool that helps developer mock API endpoints quickly & dynamically outside the application code.

Related Comparisons

Postman
Swagger UI

Postman vs Swagger UI

Mapbox
Google Maps

Google Maps vs Mapbox

Mapbox
Leaflet

Leaflet vs Mapbox vs OpenLayers

Twilio SendGrid
Mailgun

Mailgun vs Mandrill vs SendGrid

Runscope
Postman

Paw vs Postman vs Runscope