

It understands OpenAPI/Swagger definitions, allows test automation, and supports different environments. Insomnia, created and maintained by API gateway company Kong, is another GUI client alternative to Postman. It also lets you save your request definitions in collections and supports environments. REST, WebSockets, and GraphQL are supported. While it isn’t feature complete in that regard, Hoppscotch does come with impressive functionality. Open it in your browser and start sending requests-no installation is required.Īs its previous name suggests, it set out to be a direct competitor to Postman. Hoppscotchįormerly known as Postwoman, Hoppscotch is a web-based API client. These clients usually deliver a better user experience than CLI tools, but-depending on their implementation-it might be harder to integrate them into a CI/CD pipeline. The next category is API clients that come with a graphical user interface. It’s an HTTPie wrapper around cURL-it can match cURL’s performance and feature parity while maintaining HTTPie’s ease of use. CurlieĬurlie tries to hit the sweet spot between cURL and HTTPie. HTTPie has a major drawback: its often subpar performance can hinder executing hundreds of automated tests.

While there aren’t many online guides, the client is significantly easier to use. HTTPie aims to provide a more user-friendly interface than cURL’s clunky one.
#Postman vs insomnia 2020 free
It’s open source and free as in free beer, but it doesn’t come preinstalled on modern operating systems. HTTPie is a more up-to-date alternative to cURL. But since it’s a de facto standard Linux software, it remains popular, with countless guides and tutorials offered online (there are over 40,000 questions with the cURL tag just on Stack Overflow). It’s a battle-tested tool that has displayed good performance characteristics over the years, and it can handle running huge API test suites.ĬURL’s main downsides are its age and cumbersome interface. It comes preinstalled on all major Linux distributions and even macOS it’s also free and open source. cURLĬURL is the most widely used Linux CLI API client. They run in the command line and can easily integrate with other tools, making easy work out of automation and CI/CD integration.

Let’s start with command line interface (CLI) clients.
