chioka shimizu

Stoplight is a really great documentation tool, but when I create my API specification or documentation, I need to ensure the params, the endpoint, etc, in my doc can totally work for everyone. In this case, I need to debug the API endpoints as well, but Stoplight doesn't provide me with a powerful debugging tool.

So I migrated to Apidog, with Apidog, I can design my APIs, generate beautiful documentation, and share them with others like Stoplight does, and I can also debug my API in a very convenient way like using Postman.

I would say that Apidog is a combination of Postman and Stoplight, with Apidog, I don't need to switch several tools at the same time. I can use it for API designing, documentation, testing, and even automated testing. It's really comprehensive tool in the API field I had never ever met.

1. Usability: Postman Free Plan has a restriction on API Calls, Collection Runners, and Flows, But Apidog even if you use the Free version, it doesn't have ANY restrictions. You can call APIs as many times as you like.

2. API Designing &Documentation: I would say Postman is indeed a great tool for API Testing, but its documentation feature is not that good. it doesn't have GUI to define API spec, and can't generate API spec from requests. If I use Apidog, I can generate API documents from requests I sent before, and I can design my API with GUI and publish it to my own website.

3. Lack of Collaboration: You can use Postman to manage your APIs, but it doesn't have any association with your collections. When an API undergoes changes, which is common in agile projects, everyone in the team has to manually rewrite all the related requests and tests. This can become extremely challenging and hard to maintain, especially for larger projects. In Apidog, once the API has been changed, the change will be automatically synced to the test step of test scenarios.

4. Mock Data: In Postman, I have to manually write the rules of response from the mock server, which costs me a lot of time, but in Apidog, everything gets ready cause it has a smart built-in mock server, I can directly use it to generate mock data.

Although Google claims GA4 has improved capabilities in many aspects compared to Universal Analytics (UA), GA4 is really a disaster for users who need data analysis. Let me give a few examples: Previously on UA, my website's daily visitor data was almost updated in real-time. Now on GA4, I have to wait 1-2 days or even longer for the data to finish updating. With UA, I could easily analyze the details of each landing page data, and most of the time the data was accurate. But now on GA4, after I filter the data for multiple times, GA4 automatically adds a strange mechanism of data sampling, causing my data analysis to fall into a predicament. And so on, GA4 is so difficult to use. I really miss the good old UA, it was so great. In addition, now I use Looker Studio for data analysis, because I found the data pulled from GA4 into Looker Studio is more accurate and timely.