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Postman vs Postwoman: What are the differences?
Postwoman is an open-source API request builder and testing tool that is similar to Postman. Let's explore the key differences between Postman and Postwoman:
User Interface and Experience: Postman provides a comprehensive and feature-rich graphical user interface (GUI) to easily create, send, and manage API requests. Postwoman, on the other hand, is a lightweight and minimalist API client that focuses on simplicity and ease of use. It provides a clean and streamlined interface with a minimal set of features, making it lightweight and efficient for quick API testing and debugging.
Open Source and Customizability: Postman is a proprietary tool that offers both free and paid versions. It provides a range of advanced features, such as automated testing, team collaboration, and API documentation generation. Postwoman, on the other hand, is an open-source project that is freely available and community-driven. Being open source, Postwoman offers the advantage of customizability, allowing users to modify and extend its functionality to suit their specific needs.
Installation and Accessibility: Postman is a desktop application available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It requires downloading and installing the application on the user's machine. Postwoman, on the other hand, is a web-based application accessible through a web browser. Users can access Postwoman directly from their browser without the need for installation or additional software. This web-based nature of Postwoman offers the advantage of cross-platform compatibility and easy accessibility, as it can be used on any operating system with a web browser.
Ecosystem and Integration: Postman has a robust ecosystem with various integrations and extensions that enhance the API development workflow. It integrates well with popular development tools, version control systems, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Postwoman, being a lightweight tool, may have fewer integrations and extensions available compared to Postman. However, as an open-source project, it allows users to contribute and build custom integrations as needed.
In summary, Postman provides a feature-rich GUI with advanced functionality and a strong ecosystem of integrations. It is suitable for complex API workflows and team collaboration. Postwoman, on the other hand, focuses on simplicity and ease of use, with a minimalist interface and web-based accessibility. It is lightweight, open-source, and offers customization options.
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 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
Pros of Postwoman
- Brings some much needed gender balance9
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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
