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Postman

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Postman vs Swagger UI: What are the differences?

Developers describe Postman as "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. On the other hand, Swagger UI is detailed as "dependency-free collection of HTML, Javascript, and CSS assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation". 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.

Postman and Swagger UI are primarily classified as "API" and "Documentation as a Service &" tools respectively.

"Easy to use" is the top reason why over 463 developers like Postman, while over 33 developers mention "Open Source" as the leading cause for choosing Swagger UI.

PedidosYa, Movielala, and Webedia are some of the popular companies that use Postman, whereas Swagger UI is used by Clever, triGo GmbH, and Hootsuite. Postman has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1725 company stacks & 2166 developers stacks; compared to Swagger UI, which is listed in 203 company stacks and 101 developer stacks.

Advice on Postman and Swagger UI
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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 · 325.5K 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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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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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 Swagger UI
Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 1 upvote · 289.2K 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 Swagger UI
  • 488
    Easy to use
  • 368
    Great tool
  • 275
    Makes developing rest api's easy peasy
  • 155
    Easy setup, looks good
  • 143
    The best api workflow out there
  • 53
    History feature
  • 53
    It's the best
  • 44
    Adds real value to my workflow
  • 42
    Great interface that magically predicts your needs
  • 34
    The best in class app
  • 11
    Can save and share script
  • 9
    Fully featured without looking cluttered
  • 7
    Collections
  • 7
    Option to run scrips
  • 7
    Global/Environment Variables
  • 6
    Dead simple and useful. Excellent
  • 6
    Shareable Collections
  • 6
    Dark theme easy on the eyes
  • 5
    Awesome customer support
  • 5
    Great integration with newman
  • 4
    Simple
  • 4
    The test script is useful
  • 4
    Documentation
  • 3
    Easy as pie
  • 3
    Saves responses
  • 3
    Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
  • 3
    This has simplified my testing significantly
  • 2
    API-network
  • 2
    I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
  • 2
    Mocking API calls with predefined response
  • 1
    Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
  • 1
    Graph
  • 1
    Postman Runner CI Integration
  • 1
    Now supports GraphQL
  • 1
    Continuous integration using newman
  • 1
    Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
  • 0
    <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>
  • 0
    Runner
  • 48
    Open Source
  • 34
    Can execute api calls from the documentation
  • 29
    Free to use
  • 19
    Customizable
  • 14
    Easy to implement in .Net
  • 13
    Mature, clean spec
  • 12
    API Visualization
  • 9
    Coverage
  • 6
    Scaffolding
  • 6
    Easy to use
  • 5
    Vibrant and active community
  • 4
    Elegant
  • 3
    Adopted by tm forum api
  • 2
    Clear for React
  • 1
    Api
  • 1
    Can deploy API to AWS API Gateway and AWS Lambda

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Cons of Postman
Cons of Swagger UI
  • 9
    Bloated features and UI
  • 9
    Stores credentials in HTTP
  • 8
    Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
  • 7
    Poor GraphQL support
  • 5
    Expensive
  • 3
    Can't prompt for per-request variables
  • 3
    Not free after 5 users
  • 1
    Import curl
  • 1
    Import swagger
  • 1
    Support websocket
  • 3
    Need to learn YAML and RAML
  • 2
    Documentation doesn't look that good
  • 1
    Doesn't generate code snippets in different languages
  • 1
    You don’t actually get in-line error highlighting
  • 1
    Does not support hypermedia

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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 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

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

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

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What are some alternatives to Postman and Swagger UI?
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.
Fiddler
It is a free web debugging proxy for any browser, system or platform. It helps you debug web applications by capturing network traffic between the Internet and test computers. The tool enables you to inspect incoming and outgoing data to monitor and modify requests and responses before the browser receives them.
See all alternatives