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  5. Postman vs Rest.li

Postman vs Rest.li

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Postman
Postman
Stacks96.1K
Followers82.5K
Votes1.8K
Forks0
Rest.li
Rest.li
Stacks14
Followers39
Votes0
GitHub Stars2.5K
Forks556

Postman vs Rest.li: What are the differences?

Postman and Rest.li are two commonly used tools in the field of web development and API testing. While both tools serve the purpose of testing APIs, they have key differences that set them apart. In this markdown, we will discuss the key differences between Postman and Rest.li.
  1. Integration with other tools: Postman offers extensive integration capabilities with various tools and platforms. It allows seamless integration with popular tools like Jenkins, Git, and Newman, which helps in automating the API testing process. On the other hand, Rest.li emphasizes integration with LinkedIn's ecosystem and is tightly integrated with other LinkedIn tools, making it the preferred choice for developers working with LinkedIn services.

  2. Language Support: Postman supports multiple programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and more. This allows developers to write test scripts in their preferred programming language, enhancing flexibility and ease of use. In contrast, Rest.li is more focused on Java as its primary language. It provides a Java client library and encourages the use of Java for building APIs, limiting the language options available for developers.

  3. Data Modeling: Rest.li has a strong emphasis on data modeling as it provides a robust schema-based approach. It utilizes the Avro schema for defining data models, enabling automatic data validation and enforcing data consistency across APIs. Postman, on the other hand, does not have built-in support for data modeling and validation. Developers need to handle data validation manually, which can be a time-consuming and error-prone process.

  4. API Documentation: Postman includes a feature-rich documentation editor that allows developers to create detailed API documentation effortlessly. It offers customization options, such as adding code snippets, images, and examples, which enhances the readability and understanding of APIs. Rest.li provides its own built-in documentation generator, which automatically generates API documentation based on the defined resources. While it covers the essentials, Rest.li's documentation may not offer the same level of customization and flexibility as Postman.

  5. Development Environment: Postman provides a full-fledged development environment where developers can write, test, and debug APIs. It includes features like code autocompletion, syntax highlighting, and environment variables, making it an ideal choice for developers who prefer an integrated development experience. Rest.li, on the other hand, focuses more on being a lightweight framework for building scalable and high-performance APIs. It does not offer the same level of development environment features as Postman.

  6. Community Support: Postman has a large and active user community. It offers extensive resources, including forums, blogs, and tutorials, where developers can seek help, share knowledge, and learn from others. The community-driven support helps in quickly resolving issues and staying up-to-date with the latest trends in API testing. Rest.li, being a tool developed by LinkedIn, may not have the same level of community support as Postman. However, it benefits from LinkedIn's backing and is backed by a strong engineering team.

In summary, Postman excels in integration capabilities, multi-language support, and a comprehensive development environment. Rest.li, on the other hand, stands out with its focus on LinkedIn ecosystem integration, strong data modeling capabilities, and automatic documentation generation. The choice between the two tools depends on the specific requirements and preferences of the development team.

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Advice on Postman, Rest.li

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
Rest.li
Rest.li

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

Rest.li is an open source REST framework for building robust, scalable RESTful architectures using type-safe bindings and asynchronous, non-blocking IO. Rest.li fills a niche for applying RESTful principals at scale with an end-to-end developer workflow for buildings REST APIs that promotes clean REST practices, uniform interface design and consistent data modeling.

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
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
2.5K
GitHub Forks
0
GitHub Forks
556
Stacks
96.1K
Stacks
14
Followers
82.5K
Followers
39
Votes
1.8K
Votes
0
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
No community feedback yet
Integrations
HipChat
HipChat
Keen
Keen
Slack
Slack
Dropbox
Dropbox
Datadog
Datadog
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Bigpanda
Bigpanda
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams
Newman
Newman
VictorOps
VictorOps
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Postman, Rest.li?

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.

ReadMe.io

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.

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.

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