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Postman vs ReadMe.io: What are the differences?
Postman and ReadMe.io are prominent tools in the API development and documentation landscape. Postman focuses on API testing, development, and collaboration, while ReadMe.io specializes in creating comprehensive API documentation. Here are the key differences between the two:
Primary Functionality: Postman is primarily designed for API testing, offering tools to design, test, and monitor APIs, ensuring their functionality and reliability. In contrast, ReadMe.io is dedicated to producing user-friendly API documentation, enabling developers to create interactive and well-structured documentation to enhance user onboarding and understanding.
Usage Scope: Postman caters to API developers, testers, and teams involved in the technical aspects of API creation, testing, and maintenance. ReadMe.io, on the other hand, targets API providers seeking to deliver informative documentation to users, focusing on the informational and instructional aspect of APIs.
Integration and Automation: While both tools offer integrations with third-party services, Postman stands out for its robust integrations and automation capabilities, making it suitable for continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. ReadMe.io, while providing integrations, concentrates more on creating static documentation that's easy to navigate and understand.
Audience Engagement: Postman promotes team collaboration with features like shared workspaces and version control, facilitating communication among developers working on APIs. In contrast, ReadMe.io empowers developer engagement by enabling the creation of API documentation that's clear, interactive, and accessible to external developers and users.
Workflow Emphasis: Postman streamlines API development, testing, and collaboration by offering features for designing requests, automating tests, and monitoring API performance. ReadMe.io focuses on simplifying the process of creating comprehensive API documentation, ensuring that users can easily understand and utilize APIs.
Community vs. Development: Postman's emphasis is on fostering collaboration within the development team by providing tools for API design, testing, and team communication. ReadMe.io centers on the external community of developers and users, focusing on creating documentation that helps users effectively interact with APIs.
In summary, Postman excels in API testing, development, and team collaboration, ReadMe.io shines in creating user-friendly API documentation to enhance user understanding and engagement.
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?"
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).
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.
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.
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.
Pros of Postman
- Easy to use490
- Great tool369
- Makes developing rest api's easy peasy276
- Easy setup, looks good156
- The best api workflow out there144
- It's the best53
- History feature53
- Adds real value to my workflow44
- Great interface that magically predicts your needs43
- The best in class app35
- Can save and share script12
- Fully featured without looking cluttered10
- Collections8
- Option to run scrips8
- Global/Environment Variables8
- Shareable Collections7
- Dead simple and useful. Excellent7
- Dark theme easy on the eyes7
- Awesome customer support6
- Great integration with newman6
- Documentation5
- Simple5
- The test script is useful5
- Saves responses4
- This has simplified my testing significantly4
- Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,34
- Easy as pie4
- API-network3
- I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis3
- Mocking API calls with predefined response3
- Now supports GraphQL2
- Postman Runner CI Integration2
- Easy to setup, test and provides test storage2
- Continuous integration using newman2
- Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable2
- Runner2
- Graph2
- <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>1
Pros of ReadMe.io
- Great UI18
- Easy15
- Customizable10
- Cute mascot10
- Looks great and is fun to use8
- It's friggin awesome5
- Make sample API calls inside the docs3
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Cons of Postman
- Stores credentials in HTTP10
- Bloated features and UI9
- Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens8
- Poor GraphQL support7
- Expensive5
- Not free after 5 users3
- Can't prompt for per-request variables3
- Import swagger1
- Support websocket1
- Import curl1
Cons of ReadMe.io
- Support is awful4
- No backup and restore capability3
- Important parts of the CSS are locked2
- Document structure is severely restricted2
- Full of bugs2
- No notifications of edits by other users2
- Supports only two documents plus a blog1
- Does not support pre-request scripts1
- Random pages display content of other pages instead1
- Review and comment functionality is hard to work with1
- Navigation in user-facing copy is spotty1
- All admins have full editing rights1
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What is Postman?
What is ReadMe.io?
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