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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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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 · 392.8K 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
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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 Postman and ReadMe.io
Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 1 upvote · 346.5K 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
  • 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>
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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?
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