You can write test scripts for your Postman API requests in JavaScript. Postman is a collaboration platform for API development. Summary: Postman vs RapidAPI vs Paw vs Apigee vs Assertible vs Insomnia.Top Alternatives to Postman for API Testing.In general, I can foresee myself using both on a regular basis. Whilst Postman remains better suited to some tasks, I’ve moved all my GraphQL work into Insomnia. There’s no such thing as the perfect tool, only the right tool for the job. For that matter, I suppose we should be wondering whether “one tool to rule them all” would even be a good thing.Īnyway, for the time being, I’ll continue to happily use both as required by the task at hand. We’ll have to wait and see whether either or both of these things happen I suppose. For my money though, the Postman team seem to be the more commercially focused. It is also possible Insomnia will get more of the sort of “enterprisey” features that Postman currently leads on. Looking to the future, I predict Postman will start to imitate some of Insomnia’s GraphQL support. Luckily, this is made really easy by Insomnia’s ability to both import and export requests using Postman’s “Collection” file format. A future of coexistence?Īs I work across different types of API – or even different aspects of the same API – I find myself switching from one app to the other. There are also tools (which I’ve not used) to set up mock servers. When combined with the ability to run Postman from the CLI ( via Newman), you’ve got yourself a pretty nifty way to incorporate integration testing into your CI pipeline. In Postman I’m able to write Javascript to run before and/or after a request so that I can things up and test the response. On the other hand, Postman has a much richer experience when it comes to operationally supporting an API in production. Let me put it this way: if you’re working with GraphQL, give Insomnia a try. As well as all this, it quietly sorts all the headers out, so that everything just works. The schema is then used to populate the auto-complete system, which makes composing queries very quick indeed. By selecting GraphQL as the body type in the drop down, Insomnia will immediately go and fetch the schema from the endpoint. The first difference to highlight is obviously the one that drew me to Insomnia – GraphQL support.
And both have ways of taking data from the response of one request and using it in another (via “ test scripts” in Postman and “ chaining” in Insomnia).Both have templating/tagging systems that allow for the management of multiple environments.They’re both “freemium” apps, with extra features (mainly around collaboration) available for subscribers.Both are Electron apps, with the usual pros (e.g.
The similarities are more than skin deep too:
Regardless, both make it pretty obvious how to write and run your first call. To my eye, Insomnia is almost a little stark when you first run it, but I suppose this plays to the simplicity of the aesthetic. Postman arranges these panes one above the other, but Insomnia defaults to placing them side by side. The similaritiesĮven at first glance, there are a few similarities between the two: both have a panel on the left for saved requests, a pane for writing composing requests, and a pane for the response. The Insomnia app running a simple GraphQL query against the (wonderful) FakerQL hosted endpoint. Anyway, with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get stuck in. I’ll try and do a comparison but I may well miss some things. Now, I’m not an expert in either application, but I’ve been using Postman for a while now and I’ve used Insomnia quite a bit this week. When I Googled for tips on using Postman for GraphQL, the top result was this Stackoverflow answer, which had been edited to recommend Insomnia. Since GraphQL queries are just REST calls with a specific payload, it is, of course, entirely possible to perform them in Postman. Recently, however, I’ve changed jobs and started working extensively with GraphQL (a topic on which I may in time write a post).
The truth is that I have been really happy with Postman on the whole. Unlike last time, however, I won’t be ditching the previous flavour of the month… Read on to discover why (for the time being at least) they both get a spot on my desktop.įirst things first, it’s probably worth explaining what lead me to even look for an alternative to Postman. Before that, I’d been using Fiddler to make calls to REST APIs and man, was that a drag! Recently I’ve had a similar experience when I discovered an alternative REST client called Insomnia. Just over a year ago I was emphatically singing the praises of Postman.