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Postman vs Runscope: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Postman and Runscope. Both Postman and Runscope are popular API testing and monitoring tools, but they have their own distinct features and functionalities that set them apart.

  1. Integration with Development Environment: One key difference between Postman and Runscope is their integration with the development environment. Postman provides a seamless integration with various development environments, such as Chrome, Slack, and Visual Studio Code, allowing developers to easily interact with APIs and test requests. On the other hand, Runscope offers a more streamlined integration with continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) tools like Jenkins, allowing developers to incorporate API testing into their existing CI/CD workflows.

  2. Collaboration and Team Management: Another difference between Postman and Runscope lies in their collaboration and team management capabilities. Postman provides robust collaboration features, such as team workspaces and shared collections, which enable teams to collaborate on API development and testing. It also offers role-based access control, allowing administrators to define permissions and manage team members' access to APIs. In contrast, Runscope offers collaboration features with the ability to share tests and results with team members. However, it doesn't provide the same level of team management functionalities as Postman.

  3. API Monitoring and Alerts: Postman primarily focuses on API testing, while Runscope specializes in API monitoring. Runscope provides powerful monitoring capabilities, allowing you to monitor API endpoints for availability, performance, and functionality. It also offers customizable alerts and notifications when there are issues with your APIs or if they deviate from expected behavior. Postman, on the other hand, does not have built-in monitoring capabilities, and you would need to use third-party integrations to achieve similar functionality.

  4. API Documentation: When it comes to API documentation, Postman provides a comprehensive solution with its built-in API documentation feature. You can easily create and publish API documentation with rich content, examples, and interactive elements directly from Postman. Runscope, on the other hand, does not have a built-in API documentation feature. You would need to rely on other tools or platforms to generate and maintain API documentation separately from your API tests and monitoring.

  5. Pricing and Deployment Options: Postman provides both free and paid plans, with additional features and capabilities available in the paid plans. It also offers a cloud-based solution where you can access your collections and tests from any device with an internet connection. Runscope, on the other hand, only provides a paid solution and does not offer a free plan. It also offers the flexibility of deploying it both on-premises and in the cloud, catering to different enterprise needs and security requirements.

  6. User Interface and Usability: Postman is widely praised for its user-friendly and intuitive user interface. It provides a visually appealing and easy-to-use interface, making it accessible to both technical and non-technical users. Runscope, on the other hand, has a simpler and more streamlined user interface, which may be preferred by more advanced users who prefer a minimalistic design.

In summary, the key differences between Postman and Runscope lie in their integration with development environments, collaboration and team management capabilities, API monitoring and alerts, API documentation features, pricing and deployment options, as well as user interface and usability. Each tool has its own strengths and focuses, so the choice between Postman and Runscope depends on the specific requirements and preferences of your API testing and monitoring needs.

Advice on Postman and Runscope
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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 · 395.3K 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
Recommends
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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 Runscope

OpenAPI is an excellent tool for creating interactive and hosted documents when releasing an API to the public. We will leverage this, specifically for the public facing APIs that customers can integrate into (to automate creating projects and storing experiment data). Postman is more complicated to share with others and is not as rich for documentation.

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Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 1 upvote · 348.6K 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 Runscope
  • 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>
  • 17
    Great features
  • 15
    Easy to use
  • 4
    Nicely priced
  • 4
    Free plan
  • 2
    No install needed - runs on cloud
  • 2
    Decent
  • 1
    Collections
  • 1
    Dead simple and useful. Excellent
  • 1
    Awesome customer support
  • 1
    Import scripts from sources including Postman
  • 1
    Shareable Collections
  • 1
    Global & Collection level variables
  • 1
    Graphical view of response times historically
  • 1
    Integrations - StatusPage, PagerDuty, HipChat, Victorop
  • 1
    Run tests from multiple locations across globe
  • 1
    Schedule test collections to auto-run at intervals
  • 1
    Auto Re-run failed scheduled tests before notifying
  • 1
    Makes developing REST APIs easy
  • 1
    History feature - call history and response history
  • 1
    Restrict access by teams
  • 1
    Fully featured without looking cluttered
  • 1
    Can save and share scripts

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Cons of Postman
Cons of Runscope
  • 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
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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 Runscope?

    Keep tabs on all aspects of your API's performance with uptime monitoring, integration testing, logging and real-time monitoring.

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

    What companies use Postman?
    What companies use Runscope?
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