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Postman

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Postman vs ReadMe.io: What are the differences?

Developers describe Postman as "Only complete API development environment". Postman is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide. On the other hand, ReadMe.io is detailed as "Beautiful documentation made easy". Collaborative Developer Hubs.

Postman can be classified as a tool in the "API Tools" category, while ReadMe.io is grouped under "Documentation as a Service & Tools".

Some of the features offered by Postman are:

  • Compact layout
  • HTTP requests with file upload support
  • Formatted API responses for JSON and XML

On the other hand, ReadMe.io provides the following key features:

  • 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.

"Easy to use" is the primary reason why developers consider Postman over the competitors, whereas "Great UI" was stated as the key factor in picking ReadMe.io.

PedidosYa, Movielala, and Webedia are some of the popular companies that use Postman, whereas ReadMe.io is used by UNION, ReadMe.io, and Codacy. Postman has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1725 company stacks & 2166 developers stacks; compared to ReadMe.io, which is listed in 33 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.

Advice on Postman and ReadMe.io
Needs advice
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PostmanPostmanApiaryApiary
and
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 · 323.9K 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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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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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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Decisions about Postman and ReadMe.io
Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 1 upvote · 287.8K 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 Postman
Pros of ReadMe.io
  • 488
    Easy to use
  • 368
    Great tool
  • 275
    Makes developing rest api's easy peasy
  • 155
    Easy setup, looks good
  • 143
    The best api workflow out there
  • 53
    History feature
  • 53
    It's the best
  • 44
    Adds real value to my workflow
  • 42
    Great interface that magically predicts your needs
  • 34
    The best in class app
  • 11
    Can save and share script
  • 9
    Fully featured without looking cluttered
  • 7
    Collections
  • 7
    Option to run scrips
  • 7
    Global/Environment Variables
  • 6
    Dead simple and useful. Excellent
  • 6
    Shareable Collections
  • 6
    Dark theme easy on the eyes
  • 5
    Awesome customer support
  • 5
    Great integration with newman
  • 4
    Simple
  • 4
    The test script is useful
  • 4
    Documentation
  • 3
    Easy as pie
  • 3
    Saves responses
  • 3
    Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
  • 3
    This has simplified my testing significantly
  • 2
    API-network
  • 2
    I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
  • 2
    Mocking API calls with predefined response
  • 1
    Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
  • 1
    Graph
  • 1
    Postman Runner CI Integration
  • 1
    Now supports GraphQL
  • 1
    Continuous integration using newman
  • 1
    Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
  • 0
    <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>
  • 0
    Runner
  • 18
    Great UI
  • 15
    Easy
  • 10
    Customizable
  • 10
    Cute mascot
  • 8
    Looks great and is fun to use
  • 5
    It's friggin awesome
  • 3
    Make sample API calls inside the docs

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Cons of Postman
Cons of ReadMe.io
  • 9
    Bloated features and UI
  • 9
    Stores credentials in HTTP
  • 8
    Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
  • 7
    Poor GraphQL support
  • 5
    Expensive
  • 3
    Can't prompt for per-request variables
  • 3
    Not free after 5 users
  • 1
    Import curl
  • 1
    Import swagger
  • 1
    Support websocket
  • 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
  • 2
    No notifications of edits by other users
  • 1
    Supports only two documents plus a blog
  • 1
    Does not support pre-request scripts
  • 1
    Random pages display content of other pages instead
  • 1
    Review and comment functionality is hard to work with
  • 1
    Navigation in user-facing copy is spotty
  • 1
    All admins have full editing rights

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What is Postman?

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

What is ReadMe.io?

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.

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

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

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What are some alternatives to Postman and ReadMe.io?
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
Insomnia REST Client
Insomnia is a powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication for Mac, Window, and Linux.
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.
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.
cURL
Used in command lines or scripts to transfer data. It is also used in cars, television sets, routers, printers, audio equipment, mobile phones, tablets, and is the internet transfer backbone for thousands of software applications affecting billions of humans daily.
See all alternatives