Postman vs Swagger UI

Overview

Postman

Stacks96.5K

Followers82.5K

Votes1.8K

Forks0

Swagger UI

Stacks2.0K

Followers1.8K

Votes207

GitHub Stars28.3K

Forks9.2K

Postman vs Swagger UI: What are the differences?

Postman and Swagger UI are widely used tools in API development and testing. Postman provides a comprehensive API development environment, while Swagger UI focuses on API documentation and visualization.

User Interface: Postman provides a user-friendly interface with a wide range of features, including request creation, response visualization, and test automation capabilities. It offers a graphical interface that simplifies the creation, sending, and management of API requests. In contrast, Swagger UI primarily focuses on API documentation, offering an interactive and visually appealing interface for exploring and testing APIs.
Request Building and Testing: Postman offers a robust set of features for creating and sending API requests. It provides a variety of request methods, authentication options, and parameter customization. Postman also allows for automated testing and the creation of test scripts. Swagger UI, on the other hand, is primarily focused on API documentation and visualization, providing a read-only interface for exploring and interacting with APIs.
API Documentation: Swagger UI is a dedicated tool for API documentation, using the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) to document RESTful APIs in a standardized format. It simplifies the process by automatically generating documentation from the API definition, facilitating sharing and maintenance of API documentation. On the other hand, Postman, while having some documentation capabilities, is not as focused on this aspect as Swagger UI.
Collaboration and Teamwork: Postman provides collaboration features, allowing team members to work together on API development, testing, and documentation. It offers features like shared workspaces, version control, and team collaboration tools. Swagger UI, on the other hand, focuses more on individual API documentation and visualization and may require additional tools or platforms for collaboration among team members.
Ecosystem and Integrations: Postman has a thriving ecosystem with a wide range of integrations and extensions, making it a versatile tool for API development and testing. It integrates with popular development tools, source control systems, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Swagger UI, while it offers some integrations, has a more limited ecosystem compared to Postman.

In summary, Postman is a comprehensive API development environment with a user-friendly interface, robust testing capabilities, and extensive collaboration features. It excels in request building, automation, and team collaboration. Swagger UI, on the other hand, is primarily focused on API documentation and visualization, providing a visually appealing interface for exploring and sharing API documentation based on the OpenAPI Specification. It is well-suited for generating interactive API documentation but lacks the extensive testing and collaboration features of Postman.

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Advice on Postman, Swagger UI

Jagdeep

Tech Lead at Founder and Lightning

May 6, 2019

Reviewon

Postman

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).

410k views410k

Comments

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

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	Swagger UI
It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.	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	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 28.3K
GitHub Forks 0	GitHub Forks 9.2K
Stacks 96.5K	Stacks 2.0K
Followers 82.5K	Followers 1.8K
Votes 1.8K	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 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 Doesn't generate code snippets in different languages 1 Does not support hypermedia 1 You don’t actually get in-line error highlighting
Integrations
HipChat Keen Slack Dropbox Datadog PagerDuty Bigpanda Microsoft Teams Newman VictorOps	Node.js Git Microsoft Edge Safari Firefox Google Chrome

What are some alternatives to Postman, Swagger UI?

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