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  5. Postman vs ReadMe.io vs Swagger UI

Postman vs ReadMe.io vs Swagger UI

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Postman
Postman
Stacks96.1K
Followers82.5K
Votes1.8K
Forks0
ReadMe.io
ReadMe.io
Stacks114
Followers365
Votes69
Swagger UI
Swagger UI
Stacks2.1K
Followers1.8K
Votes207
GitHub Stars28.3K
Forks9.2K

Postman vs ReadMe.io vs Swagger UI: What are the differences?

Introduction:

In the realm of API documentation and testing, tools like Postman, ReadMe.io, and Swagger UI play crucial roles. Despite their similar functionalities, each platform has its unique features and strengths. Below are the key differences between Postman, ReadMe.io, and Swagger UI.

  1. Functionality: Postman is primarily known for its robust API testing capabilities, allowing users to send requests to APIs and analyze responses. ReadMe.io focuses on providing in-depth API documentation, including code snippets, and interactive examples. Meanwhile, Swagger UI is more of a design-first approach, enabling developers to define APIs using the OpenAPI Specification and then visualizing and interacting with them in a user-friendly interface.

  2. Collaboration Features: Postman offers team collaboration features such as shared collections and integrated version control, making it a preferred choice for teams working on API projects. ReadMe.io provides advanced collaboration tools, including team permissions, feedback loops, and versioning, which are vital for maintaining high-quality API documentation. In contrast, Swagger UI lacks built-in collaboration features, making it less suitable for large team-based projects.

  3. User Interface (UI): Postman boasts a user-friendly interface with a variety of tools and tabs for organizing and managing API requests. ReadMe.io focuses on creating visually appealing and easy-to-navigate documentation websites for APIs, emphasizing user experience. Swagger UI is more geared towards visualizing API specifications in a clean and structured format, keeping the focus on the API design itself.

  4. Extensibility: Postman allows users to extend its functionality through the use of scripts, custom integrations, and environments, enabling advanced automation and customization options. ReadMe.io offers integrations with various third-party tools and services, enhancing the overall API documentation experience. On the other hand, Swagger UI lacks the same level of extensibility, limiting users in terms of customization and integration capabilities.

  5. Pricing Model: Postman offers a freemium model with limitations on the number of API calls and team collaboration features in the free version, while the paid plans provide additional functionality and support. ReadMe.io follows a subscription-based pricing model, offering different tiers based on the number of users and features required. Swagger UI, being open-source, is free to use and customize according to the specific needs of the users.

In Summary, when choosing between Postman, ReadMe.io, and Swagger UI, consider your priorities regarding API testing, documentation, collaboration, user interface, extensibility, and pricing model to determine the most suitable tool for your project.

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Advice on Postman, ReadMe.io, Swagger UI

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
Swagger UI
Swagger UI

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.

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

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.
The UI works in any development environment, be it locally or in the web;Allow end developers to effortlessly interact and try out every single operation your API exposes for easy consumption;Quickly find and work with resources and endpoints with neatly categorized documentation;Cater to every possible scenario with Swagger UI working in all major browsers
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
28.3K
GitHub Forks
0
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
9.2K
Stacks
96.1K
Stacks
114
Stacks
2.1K
Followers
82.5K
Followers
365
Followers
1.8K
Votes
1.8K
Votes
69
Votes
207
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
    Full of bugs
  • 2
    Document structure is severely restricted
  • 2
    No notifications of edits by other users
Pros
  • 49
    Open Source
  • 34
    Can execute api calls from the documentation
  • 29
    Free to use
  • 19
    Customizable
  • 14
    Easy to implement in .Net
Cons
  • 3
    Need to learn YAML and RAML
  • 2
    Documentation doesn't look that good
  • 1
    Does not support hypermedia
  • 1
    You don’t actually get in-line error highlighting
  • 1
    Doesn't generate code snippets in different languages
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
Node.js
Node.js
Git
Git
Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge
Safari
Safari
Firefox
Firefox
Google Chrome
Google Chrome

What are some alternatives to Postman, ReadMe.io, Swagger UI?

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.

Read the Docs

Read the Docs

It hosts documentation, making it fully searchable and easy to find. You can import your docs using any major version control system, including Mercurial, Git, Subversion, and Bazaar.

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