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Paw

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Postman

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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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

Advice on Paw 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 Paw and Postman

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.

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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 Paw
Pros of Postman
  • 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
  • 12
    Integrations
  • 9
    Multi-Dimension Environment Settings
  • 4
    Paste curl commands into Paw
  • 2
    Creates code for any language or framework
  • 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 Paw
Cons of Postman
  • 3
    It's not free
  • 2
    MacOS Only
  • 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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What is Paw?

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.

What is Postman?

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

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What companies use Paw?
What companies use Postman?
See which teams inside your own company are using Paw or Postman.
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What tools integrate with Paw?
What tools integrate with Postman?
    No integrations found

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    What are some alternatives to Paw and Postman?
    Insomnia REST Client
    Insomnia is a powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication for Mac, Window, and Linux.
    RestSharp
    It is probably the most popular HTTP client library for .NET. Featuring automatic serialization and deserialization, request and response type detection, variety of authentications and other useful features
    OpenAPI
    It is a publicly available application programming interface that provides developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application or web service.
    Retrofit
    Retrofit turns your HTTP API into a Java interface
    OpenAPI Specification
    It defines a standard, language-agnostic interface to RESTful APIs which allows both humans and computers to discover and understand the capabilities of the service without access to source code, documentation, or through network traffic inspection.
    See all alternatives