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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.
What is Postman?
What is Swagger UI?
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Why do developers choose Postman?
- Easy to use464
- Great tool356
Why do developers choose Swagger UI?
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What are the cons of using Postman?
What are the cons of using Swagger UI?
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We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.
Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username
, password
and workspace_name
so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.
Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.
This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.
Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct
Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.
Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.
JavaScript Node.js hapi Vue.js Swagger UI Slate
Two weeks ago we released the public API for Checkly. We already had an API that was serving our frontend Vue.js app. We decided to create an new set of API endpoints and not reuse the already existing one. The blog post linked below details what parts we needed to refactor, what parts we added and how we handled generating API documentation. More specifically, the post dives into:
- Refactoring the existing Hapi.js based API
- API key based authentication
- Refactoring models with Objection.js
- Validating plan limits
- Generating Swagger & Slate based documentation
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).
Secure Membership Web API backed by SQL Server. This is the backing API to store additional profile and complex membership metadata outside of an Azure AD B2C provider. The front-end using the Azure AD B2C to allow 3rd party trusted identity providers to authenticate. This API provides a way to add and manage more complex permission structures than can easily be maintained in Azure AD.
We have .Net developers and an Azure infrastructure environment using server-less functions, logic apps and SaaS where ever possible. For this service I opted to keep it as a classic WebAPI project and deployed to AppService.
- Trusted Authentication Provider: @AzureActiveDirectoryB2C
- Frameworks: .NET Core
- Language: C# , Microsoft SQL Server , JavaScript
- IDEs: Visual Studio Code , Visual Studio
- Libraries: jQuery @EntityFramework, @AutoMapper, @FeatureToggle , @Swashbuckle
- Database: @SqlAzure
- Source Control: Git
- Build and Release Pipelines: Azure DevOps
- Test tools: Postman , Newman
- Test framework: @nUnit, @moq
- Infrastructure: @AzureAppService, @AzureAPIManagement
We've tried a couple REST clients over the years, and Insomnia REST Client has won us over the most. Here's what we like about it compared to other contenders in this category:
- Uncluttered UI. Things are only in your face when you need them, and the app is visually organized in an intuitive manner.
- Native Mac app. We wanted the look and feel to be on par with other apps in our OS rather than a web app / Electron app (cough Postman).
- Easy team sync. Other apps have this too, but Insomnia's model best sets the "set and forget" mentality. Syncs are near instant and I'm always assured that I'm working on the latest version of API endpoints. Apps like Paw use a git-based approach to revision history, but I think this actually over-complicates the sync feature. For ensuring I'm always working on the latest version of something, I'd rather have the sync model be closer to Dropbox's than git's, and Insomnia is closer to Dropbox in that regard.
Some features like automatic public-facing documentation aren't supported, but we currently don't have any public APIs, so this didn't matter to us.

If you're building an API service, this Chrome extension is a must-have. It'll let you ping your endpoints using a nice clean UI that's built right into Chrome. You can also share your previous requests - a simple way to 'document' your API if you're short on time.

If someone is having trouble shipping data to the Knowtify API, I almost always share my postman collection. Working through the issue from there is typically pretty easy.

Not much to say, it's the best free tool out there for testing APIs. Get it.
Postman is a powerful tool for performing integration testing with your API. It allows for repeatable, reliable tests that can be automated and used in a variety of environments and includes useful tools for persisting data and simulating how a user might actually be interacting with the system
We use Postman in conjunction with our universal REST-API "JCVortex". Postman makes testing edge-cases hassle-free and lets testing look easy. Postman was also a great help to explore the Mojang-API, that we are dependent on, because it is the central repository for minecraft-account-data.
I use it for testing my Web Api. It's a easy tool for interacting with a RESTFul API and provides great tools for organizing requests. The Newman tool is great for allowing your tests to run in a CI/CD pipeline.
Used to test API endpoints and monitor API which also acts as an API heartbeat to keep functions alive in Google Cloud in order to avoid timeout responses to Slack.
We use Postman for all our API testing. Postman is invaluable. We would like to have a team licence so that we can use shared work spaces and test collections.