I find Paw's project management very annoying. It assumes that I am working on some project and wants me to organise everything like that. Fine, lets do it, so where are my projects? They are hidden in some dropdown that you can have fun finding.
Insomnia is much cleaner and more to the point.
To me, the functionality of Paw and Insomnia seem very similar, so the $50 licence price deterred me from purchasing Paw. If Paw was closer to the $20 mark, I might have still bought it to have in my arsenal of tools 'just in case'.
My rationale is that if there was nothing else on the market with any equivalent functionality, then $50 for Paw is a no brainer. But when there are other competitive product with equal (or greater) feature sets for free, then the pricing works against it.
Also, you say that you have all of paw's features. How do I do dynamic values in the url? How do I make and manage oAuth requests?
Update:
I can't make any requests it seems. That would seem an important feature.
In terms of the verb and the version, you can either select them from the dropdown, type or use dynamic values. The URL and all other input fields, certainly support dynamic values, which can be selected from the dropdown or autocompleted by typing the value text. We have wider support for transforms which can be nested like Paw and we do have variables, which can also be nested. You can build very complex dynamic expressions (http://bit.ly/2gz3OXO). These two features alone superset Paw on the same feature set.
We don't have builtin OAuth support but we are working on it. We don't have collections but you can save in projects (so files and folders).
The tool works in the browser by leveraging a minimal browser extension. There is currently work in progress to build it on top of Electron as a desktop app but it can be done in WebKit as well on Mac. We have not decided yet.
I genuinely believe this tool will improve your workflow once we add OAuth support and collections hence why I mentioned it here. And we do have a favourable licensing model which allows you to use the tool free of charge. This tool also works really well with all our other tools which allow you to fuzz, run security scans, and perform request inspection inside your browser without the need to install a proxy. You can even monitor iPhone HTTP traffic without too much fiddling (http://bit.ly/2h5nwex) and all of these features will be part of the desktop app.
Am I dumb or it doesn't seem to work with Safari on Mac, which is the whole point of this thread?
The browser extension depends on the browser technology as the extension ecosystem is different for each vendor. Currently, we support Chrome and Firefox but due to Web Extensions API adoption, we will be supporting out of the box all 3 major browsers: Chrome, Firefox and IE Edge (no Safari I am afraid).
That being said, the packaged app will provide a standalone version as well which means that there is an easy transition between desktop and web users and all major platforms will be supported.
This is the plan at least.
Genuine question, but why not fix your own website to tell your product’s story rather than pepper the web with small pockets of useful info about your product leaving visitors to the real deal confused?
I hope that some of you may see a potential and although may disagree with the styles and color schemes keep faith in us and come back to check it out later when we have landed the themes, the desktop version and the new extension.
It is still useful application and all discussed changes are in the pipeline.
- Cross platform
- Simpler use for non-experts
- No need for pro (paid subscription) for my needs, so it's completely free
- Feels nicer than all of the browser "REST explorer" plugins
- GraphQL support is pretty decent
- Copy as CURL is awesome
One of those moments where you kick yourself for not being able to come up with these sorts of names.
> "Download Insomnia so you can finally `GET` some `REST`"
I actually laughed out loud at that one.
Also, Projects are just Paw files. Inside the files you can group and subgroup requests, too. Unless you meant something else?
By the way, you can double-click a request to rename it :)
And, if it helps, you can rename a request in Paw by clicking on its name in the sidebar while you have the request selected or clicking on the name where it shows up as a title in the Description panel in the middle of the screen.
Can you list some of the important for you features that Insomnia lacks? (I'm not affiliated w/ Insomnia however I'm curious what makes Paw stand out to you.)
It's cross platform like postman so I can use it on my linux box and recommend it to all of our team members and it's not a pain in the ass.
Surprisingly I thought I'd place a lot of value on the native mac look and feel for this app but it really doesn't make a large difference.
Am I just missing a setting here? Seems like this is a fairly big omission, Postman even supports copying over your headers (e.g. auth token) when you follow a link.
Also, if you want it sooner, Insomnia is open source so it's possible to help grow the project. I think the only other app that's open source is Advanced REST Client but it's still a Chrome app (I think).
OS must be crazy for you.
As I say, I'm unresolved on the matter. Really nice electron apps like Insomnia are prompting a rethink.
Switched to using Insomnia from Postman since it was showcased in HN.
You should really try them both to figure out which one best suites you.
P.S. I'm the developer of Insomnia.
Also, I'm glad I found you! Long-time user of Paw, but going to make the switch to Insomnia. Question, can I just type a JS object into request body and you stringify the JSON for me? Is that something you would accept as a PR if not?
I also disliked Postman's UI, but it wasn't a deal broker. I'm not in love with Insomnia's UI, either, but I like Insomnia because it reliably sends the right request.