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Postman vs Retrofit

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Postman
89K
75.8K
+ 1
1.8K
Retrofit
346
197
+ 1
0
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Postman vs Retrofit: What are the differences?

What is Postman? 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.

What is Retrofit? A type-safe HTTP client for Android and Java. Retrofit turns your HTTP API into a Java interface.

Postman and Retrofit can be categorized as "API" 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, Retrofit provides the following key features:

  • URL parameter replacement and query parameter support
  • Object conversion to request body (e.g., JSON, protocol buffers)
  • Multipart request body and file upload

Retrofit is an open source tool with 33K GitHub stars and 6.13K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Retrofit's open source repository on GitHub.

Typeform, Bukalapak, and PedidosYa are some of the popular companies that use Postman, whereas Retrofit is used by Square, Robinhood, and Samba Tech. Postman has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1755 company stacks & 2237 developers stacks; compared to Retrofit, which is listed in 19 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.

Advice on Postman and Retrofit
StackShare Editors
| 5 upvotes · 325.1K views
Needs advice
on
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 · 353.3K views
Recommends
on
PostmanPostman
at

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
Backend Engineer · | 2 upvotes · 324.5K views
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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Jadenko
| 2 upvotes · 341.3K views
Recommends
on
Swagger UISwagger UI
at

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 Retrofit
Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 1 upvote · 313.1K views
Chose
PostmanPostman
over
Insomnia REST ClientInsomnia REST Client

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 Retrofit
  • 489
    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
    History feature
  • 53
    It's the best
  • 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
    Global/Environment Variables
  • 8
    Collections
  • 8
    Option to run scrips
  • 7
    Shareable Collections
  • 7
    Dead simple and useful. Excellent
  • 7
    Dark theme easy on the eyes
  • 6
    Great integration with newman
  • 6
    Awesome customer support
  • 5
    Simple
  • 5
    The test script is useful
  • 5
    Documentation
  • 4
    Saves responses
  • 4
    Easy as pie
  • 4
    Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
  • 4
    This has simplified my testing significantly
  • 3
    API-network
  • 3
    Mocking API calls with predefined response
  • 3
    I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
  • 2
    Runner
  • 2
    Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
  • 2
    Postman Runner CI Integration
  • 2
    Graph
  • 2
    Now supports GraphQL
  • 2
    Continuous integration using newman
  • 2
    Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
  • 1
    <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>
    Be the first to leave a pro

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    Cons of Postman
    Cons of Retrofit
    • 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
      Be the first to leave a con

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      - No public GitHub repository available -

      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 Retrofit?

      Retrofit turns your HTTP API into a Java interface

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

      Jobs that mention Postman and Retrofit as a desired skillset
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      Senior Software Engineer, Web Platform (Distribution)
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      ContinuePatternsSchedule+8
      Senior Engineer (Backend), Flows
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      ageKubernetesPostman+4
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      Senior Engineer, FullStack
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      SpeedMindSchedule+6
      What companies use Postman?
      What companies use Retrofit?
      See which teams inside your own company are using Postman or Retrofit.
      Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

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      What tools integrate with Postman?
      What tools integrate with Retrofit?

      Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

      What are some alternatives to Postman and Retrofit?
      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

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