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Postman

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Postman vs StopLight: What are the differences?

Postman is a popular API development environment, while StopLight is a platform focused on API design, testing, and documentation. Let's explore the key differences between them.

  1. Integration with Design and Documentation: One key difference between Postman and StopLight is that StopLight offers integrated design and documentation capabilities, while Postman primarily focuses on API testing and does not provide as robust design and documentation features. StopLight allows users to create and manage designs, mock servers, and documentation all in one platform, making it easier to collaborate and maintain APIs throughout their lifecycle.

  2. API Modeling and Validation: StopLight distinguishes itself from Postman by providing advanced API modeling and validation capabilities. With StopLight, users can create and validate API models using industry-standard specifications like OpenAPI, while Postman mainly relies on manual testing and does not offer native support for API modeling and validation.

  3. Collaboration and Version Control: StopLight provides advanced collaboration and version control features that are not available in Postman. StopLight allows teams to work together on API design, documentation, and development, providing features like branching, merging, and conflict resolution. In contrast, Postman offers limited collaboration features and does not have built-in version control capabilities.

  4. Code Generation: While both Postman and StopLight provide code snippets for various programming languages, StopLight offers more extensive code generation capabilities. StopLight allows users to generate code from API definitions, making it easier to integrate APIs into different programming languages and frameworks. Postman, on the other hand, focuses more on API testing and does not provide as robust code generation options.

  5. API Governance and Security: StopLight places a strong emphasis on API governance and security, providing features like role-based access control, API lifecycle management, and security audits. Postman offers some security features but does not have as comprehensive governance capabilities, making StopLight a better choice for organizations with stricter compliance and security requirements.

  6. Pricing and Licensing: Postman and StopLight have different pricing models and licensing options. Postman offers both free and paid plans, with the latter providing additional features and functionalities. StopLight offers a free plan with limited features, as well as multiple tiers of paid plans with varying levels of capabilities and support. Organizations should consider their specific needs and budget when choosing between Postman and StopLight.

In summary, Postman excels in providing a user-friendly interface for sending requests, creating test suites, and generating detailed reports, making it suitable for various stages of the API lifecycle. In contrast, StopLight focuses on visual modeling to create standardized APIs, offering robust tools for API design, testing, and documentation.

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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 · 374.1K 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
on
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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 Stoplight
Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 1 upvote · 331.1K 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 Stoplight
  • 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>
  • 9
    Responsive team

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Cons of Postman
Cons of Stoplight
  • 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 Stoplight?

    Stop writing thousands of lines of specification code. Our intuitive visual editors significantly cut down on design time, and are spec agnostic. Generate OAI (Swagger) and RAML specification code on demand.

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

    What companies use Postman?
    What companies use Stoplight?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Postman or Stoplight.
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    What tools integrate with Postman?
    What tools integrate with Stoplight?

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    What are some alternatives to Postman and Stoplight?
    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