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GraphiQL vs Postman: What are the differences?

Introduction

GraphiQL and Postman are both popular tools used by developers to interact with APIs. Although they serve a similar purpose, there are several key differences between the two that set them apart. In this article, we will explore these differences and understand when and where each tool is best suited for API development and testing.

  1. Interactivity and Usability: GraphiQL provides a highly interactive interface for making GraphQL queries and exploring the schema of the API. It offers autocompletion and syntax highlighting, making it easy to write and execute complex queries. On the other hand, Postman focuses more on REST APIs and provides a user-friendly interface for sending HTTP requests, with support for various features like authentication, headers, and variables.

  2. Response Visualization: GraphiQL excels in visualizing the response data of GraphQL queries. It displays the result in a tree-like structure, making it easier to navigate and understand the returned data. Postman, on the other hand, supports a wider range of response visualization formats, including JSON, HTML, XML, and more. It allows developers to choose the format that best suits their needs.

  3. API Documentation and Collaboration: GraphiQL automatically generates documentation for the GraphQL schema, making it easy to understand the available queries, mutations, and types. It also allows collaborative editing and sharing of queries with other team members. Postman, on the other hand, provides extensive documentation features for REST APIs, including the ability to create detailed API documentation, share collections of requests, and collaborate with team members.

  4. Request Composition and Testing: GraphiQL offers a simple and intuitive interface for composing GraphQL queries and mutations with its built-in editor. However, it lacks some advanced features like request history, test scripts, and the ability to save and organize requests. Postman, on the other hand, provides a powerful request composer that allows users to create complex requests, organize them into collections, and write test scripts to automate API testing.

  5. Extensibility and Integrations: GraphiQL is primarily focused on GraphQL and has limited support for integrating with other tools and services. Postman, on the other hand, offers a wide range of integrations with popular services like GitHub, Jenkins, Slack, and more. It also allows developers to write custom scripts and use variables to create dynamic workflows and automate API testing.

  6. Security and Authorization: GraphiQL does not provide built-in support for authentication and authorization mechanisms. It mainly relies on the underlying GraphQL server's security configuration. Postman, on the other hand, offers various options for handling authentication, including Basic Auth, OAuth, and JWT. It also provides a convenient way to manage and save authentication details for multiple APIs.

In summary, GraphiQL is a powerful tool for working with GraphQL APIs, offering a highly interactive and visual experience. On the other hand, Postman is a versatile tool that supports a wider range of API types, especially REST APIs, and provides advanced features for request composition, testing, documentation, and integration. The choice between the two depends on the specific requirements of the API being developed or tested.

Advice on GraphiQL and Postman
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Swagger UISwagger UI

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?"

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Replies (3)
Jagdeep Singh
Tech Lead at ucreate.it · | 8 upvotes · 374.1K views

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).

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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.

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Sadik Ay
Recommends
on
PostmanPostman

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.

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Decisions about GraphiQL and Postman
Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 1 upvote · 331.1K views

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.

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Pros of GraphiQL
Pros of Postman
  • 5
    Install by npm
  • 5
    In-browser IDE
  • 1
    Graphql
  • 1
    Editor Theme
  • 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
  • 53
    It's the best
  • 53
    History feature
  • 44
    Adds real value to my workflow
  • 43
    Great interface that magically predicts your needs
  • 35
    The best in class app
  • 12
    Can save and share script
  • 10
    Fully featured without looking cluttered
  • 8
    Collections
  • 8
    Option to run scrips
  • 8
    Global/Environment Variables
  • 7
    Shareable Collections
  • 7
    Dead simple and useful. Excellent
  • 7
    Dark theme easy on the eyes
  • 6
    Awesome customer support
  • 6
    Great integration with newman
  • 5
    Documentation
  • 5
    Simple
  • 5
    The test script is useful
  • 4
    Saves responses
  • 4
    This has simplified my testing significantly
  • 4
    Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
  • 4
    Easy as pie
  • 3
    API-network
  • 3
    I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
  • 3
    Mocking API calls with predefined response
  • 2
    Now supports GraphQL
  • 2
    Postman Runner CI Integration
  • 2
    Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
  • 2
    Continuous integration using newman
  • 2
    Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
  • 2
    Runner
  • 2
    Graph
  • 1
    <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>

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Cons of GraphiQL
Cons of Postman
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 10
      Stores credentials in HTTP
    • 9
      Bloated features and UI
    • 8
      Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
    • 7
      Poor GraphQL support
    • 5
      Expensive
    • 3
      Not free after 5 users
    • 3
      Can't prompt for per-request variables
    • 1
      Import swagger
    • 1
      Support websocket
    • 1
      Import curl

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    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is GraphiQL?

    An in-browser IDE for exploring GraphQL.

    What is Postman?

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

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use GraphiQL?
    What companies use Postman?
    See which teams inside your own company are using GraphiQL or Postman.
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    What tools integrate with GraphiQL?
    What tools integrate with Postman?

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    What are some alternatives to GraphiQL and Postman?
    GraphQL
    GraphQL is a data query language and runtime designed and used at Facebook to request and deliver data to mobile and web apps since 2012.
    Apollo
    Build a universal GraphQL API on top of your existing REST APIs, so you can ship new application features fast without waiting on backend changes.
    REST
    An architectural style for developing web services. A distributed system framework that uses Web protocols and technologies.
    Slick
    It is a modern database query and access library for Scala. It allows you to work with stored data almost as if you were using Scala collections while at the same time giving you full control over when a database access happens and which data is transferred.
    Spring Data
    It makes it easy to use data access technologies, relational and non-relational databases, map-reduce frameworks, and cloud-based data services. This is an umbrella project which contains many subprojects that are specific to a given database.
    See all alternatives