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API Umbrella vs Postman: What are the differences?
Introduction
When comparing API Umbrella and Postman, there are key differences that set them apart.
API Umbrella: API Umbrella is an open-source API management platform designed for organizations that need to create, manage, and distribute APIs. It focuses on managing API traffic, analytics, and developer engagement through a centralized interface. API Umbrella is more suitable for large-scale projects where comprehensive API management capabilities are essential.
Postman: Postman, on the other hand, is a collaboration platform for API development that allows users to design, mock, test, and monitor APIs. It caters to developers, testers, and other stakeholders involved in the API development process. Postman provides a user-friendly interface with features like request building, automated testing, and team collaboration that enhance productivity for API development.
API Umbrella: API Umbrella prioritizes API traffic management, rate limiting, and analytics to ensure optimal performance and security for APIs. It offers detailed insights into API usage, trends, and potential issues to help organizations make data-driven decisions and optimize their API strategy.
Postman: Postman excels in providing a comprehensive toolset for API development, offering features like automatic request generation, response validation, and scriptable workflows. It simplifies the process of API testing and collaboration, enabling teams to streamline their development workflows and accelerate the time-to-market for APIs.
API Umbrella: API Umbrella is more focused on back-end API management tasks such as routing, caching, and security policies. It serves as a gatekeeper for APIs, ensuring that only authorized requests are processed and that APIs function reliably under varying loads and conditions.
Postman: Postman, on the contrary, emphasizes front-end API testing and monitoring, allowing users to create and run automated tests, monitor API performance, and collaborate with team members on API design and implementation. It is geared towards improving the quality and reliability of APIs through comprehensive testing and monitoring capabilities.
In Summary, API Umbrella and Postman differ in their primary focus areas, with API Umbrella targeting comprehensive API management and traffic control, while Postman focuses on API development, testing, and collaboration tools.
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 API Umbrella
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 API Umbrella
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
