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  5. Postman vs ReadMe.io

Postman vs ReadMe.io

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Postman
Postman
Stacks96.1K
Followers82.5K
Votes1.8K
Forks0
ReadMe.io
ReadMe.io
Stacks114
Followers365
Votes69

Postman vs ReadMe.io: What are the differences?

Postman and ReadMe.io are prominent tools in the API development and documentation landscape. Postman focuses on API testing, development, and collaboration, while ReadMe.io specializes in creating comprehensive API documentation. Here are the key differences between the two:

  1. Primary Functionality: Postman is primarily designed for API testing, offering tools to design, test, and monitor APIs, ensuring their functionality and reliability. In contrast, ReadMe.io is dedicated to producing user-friendly API documentation, enabling developers to create interactive and well-structured documentation to enhance user onboarding and understanding.

  2. Usage Scope: Postman caters to API developers, testers, and teams involved in the technical aspects of API creation, testing, and maintenance. ReadMe.io, on the other hand, targets API providers seeking to deliver informative documentation to users, focusing on the informational and instructional aspect of APIs.

  3. Integration and Automation: While both tools offer integrations with third-party services, Postman stands out for its robust integrations and automation capabilities, making it suitable for continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. ReadMe.io, while providing integrations, concentrates more on creating static documentation that's easy to navigate and understand.

  4. Audience Engagement: Postman promotes team collaboration with features like shared workspaces and version control, facilitating communication among developers working on APIs. In contrast, ReadMe.io empowers developer engagement by enabling the creation of API documentation that's clear, interactive, and accessible to external developers and users.

  5. Workflow Emphasis: Postman streamlines API development, testing, and collaboration by offering features for designing requests, automating tests, and monitoring API performance. ReadMe.io focuses on simplifying the process of creating comprehensive API documentation, ensuring that users can easily understand and utilize APIs.

  6. Community vs. Development: Postman's emphasis is on fostering collaboration within the development team by providing tools for API design, testing, and team communication. ReadMe.io centers on the external community of developers and users, focusing on creating documentation that helps users effectively interact with APIs.

In summary, Postman excels in API testing, development, and team collaboration, ReadMe.io shines in creating user-friendly API documentation to enhance user understanding and engagement.

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Advice on Postman, ReadMe.io

Jagdeep
Jagdeep

Tech Lead at Founder and Lightning

May 6, 2019

ReviewonPostmanPostman

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).

411k views411k
Comments
StackShare
StackShare

May 1, 2019

Needs advice

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?"

382k views382k
Comments
Stephen
Stephen

Artificial Intelligence Fellow

Feb 4, 2020

Decided

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.

361k views361k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Postman
Postman
ReadMe.io
ReadMe.io

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

It is an easy-to-use tool to help you build out documentation! Each documentation site that you publish is a project where there is space for documentation, interactive API reference guides, a changelog, and much more.

Compact layout;HTTP requests with file upload support;Formatted API responses for JSON and XML;Image previews;Request history;Basic Auth, OAuth 1.0, OAuth 2.0, and other common auth helpers;Autocomplete for URL and header values;Key/value editors for adding parameters or header values. Works for URL parameters too.;Use environment variables to easily shift between settings. Great for testing production, staging or local setups.;Keyboard shortcuts to maximize your productivity;Automatically generated web documentation;Mock servers hosted on Postman’s cloud;API monitoring run from Postman cloud
Collaboration - Crowdsource your docs! Users can keep docs current by suggesting changes.;API Explorer - Let users play with your API right inside the documentation.;GitHub Sync - Keep auto-generated reference docs synced with your actual code.;Editor - Markdown-based drag-and-drop editor makes documentation almost fun.;Theme Builder - Easily create a beautiful dev community that matches your brand.;Support - Let users ask questions and request features in the support forums.;Versioning - Maintaining old or testing beta versions of your docs is a breeze!;Application Keys - Your users can view their application keys embedded right in the docs.
Statistics
GitHub Forks
0
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
96.1K
Stacks
114
Followers
82.5K
Followers
365
Votes
1.8K
Votes
69
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 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
Cons
  • 10
    Stores credentials in HTTP
  • 9
    Bloated features and UI
  • 8
    Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
  • 7
    Poor GraphQL support
  • 5
    Expensive
Pros
  • 18
    Great UI
  • 15
    Easy
  • 10
    Customizable
  • 10
    Cute mascot
  • 8
    Looks great and is fun to use
Cons
  • 4
    Support is awful
  • 3
    No backup and restore capability
  • 2
    Important parts of the CSS are locked
  • 2
    Document structure is severely restricted
  • 2
    Full of bugs
Integrations
HipChat
HipChat
Keen
Keen
Slack
Slack
Dropbox
Dropbox
Datadog
Datadog
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Bigpanda
Bigpanda
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams
Newman
Newman
VictorOps
VictorOps
GitHub
GitHub

What are some alternatives to Postman, ReadMe.io?

Swagger UI

Swagger UI

Swagger UI is a dependency-free collection of HTML, Javascript, and CSS assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation and sandbox from a Swagger-compliant API

Paw

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.

Apiary

Apiary

It takes more than a simple HTML page to thrill your API users. The right tools take weeks of development. Weeks that apiary.io saves.

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.

Docusaurus

Docusaurus

Docusaurus is a project for easily building, deploying, and maintaining open source project websites.

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.

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