Hacker News Reader

Comment by goalieca | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been looking for an alternative to postman that isn’t so insanely geared to monetization. I feel postman compromises it’s entire UX to force a simple offline tool to be cloud based.

View on HN

For simple requests where it's just convenient to have them in a list, with a description/easy to find for replaying, a VSCode extension like Rest Client [0] can be useful instead of the desktop apps. Well, VSCode is a desktop app too, but if you already use it... :P

I like it because you can just write a text file with the request and any comments you need around them, and... being just text, it's so easy to manipulate.

When I need scripts for special auth I fall back to postman though, haven't digged enough to see if I can make it work with that addon (or any other one).

Also there's Thunder Client [1] which I haven't tried but apparenly has more features.

EDIT: references

[0] https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient [1] https://www.thunderclient.io/

If you're using Intellij Idea, it supports similar http requests as well. Very convenient as those are just text files.

IntelliJ rewrote this awhile back...used to be more GUI heavy. As much as I love text, it's harder to manipulate the GET vars now :\

Same thing is available for Emacs.

I suspect that Vim, Sublime, or Notepad++ should likely already have a good equivalent of it, too.

Sublime has requester which works quite well if you’re familiar with the Python requests syntax. You write the query in the equivalent Python line and then use some hotkeys to execute/send it. Variables can be used/stored in the file for common, verbose variables such as auth tokens. The response comes back in a new tab and it’s fairly easy to search through.

Yep. VSCode's Rest Client extension is amazing, I can just have plain text files with everything I need to my cloud drive (and maybe even git repo to share with team).

That REST client is awesome, thank you for the tip.

I used to recommend https://insomnia.rest/ as it was a free, sleek alternative... Alas it's been bought by Kong and enterprise'd up the same way. Not as bad yet, but can't be long.

For the time being it's still OK. It asked me once to try the "premium" version or whatever it's called, I said no, and it never bothered me again.

I don't know what licence Postman uses. A quick search on GitHub didn't turn up the source of the app on the Postman Labs page. Insomnia is MIT [0], so it could still be forked if Kong got decided to stop supporting the free version.

[0] https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/blob/develop/LICENSE

I still like Insomnia too.

I actually wasn't aware of it being open source at all, thanks. It's not mentioned anywhere on their page, gives me a bit more confidence :)

Why would you think Kong would spoil it? Their main product is an API gateway, it makes sense to have a nice HTTP client under their umbrella. Kong is also open source and almost all of their plugins are freely available. I actually tried (and still use) Insomnia _because_ it was affiliated with Kong. YMMV but I've had no complaints about Insomnia at all.

Insomnia is great, I use it daily. Highly reccommend.

Am I having a Mandela Effect moment or did Insomnia used to be Mac only? I remember seeing it a long time ago and being disappointed I couldn't use it. Now I'm doubting my memory, lol.

Either way thanks for the recommendation/reminder for Insomnia, it looks so much better than the current version of postman.

You aren’t thinking of Paw, are you? https://paw.cloud/

You are not alone! I just checked the Git history and it seems we were indeed mistaken, at least since 2017. It might have been just hard to see from the website.

"Insomnia is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux and can be downloaded from http://insomnia.rest/download/"

https://github.com/Kong/insomnia/commit/23cca8c42b80aa6d9de2...

Monetization dark patterns is one thing. But how on earth do they lure people away from the good old plaintext-in-git workflow? I found everything about postman to be anti-git in nature, and then I lose versioning, CI/CD becomes weird, etc. I just don’t see the advantage for teams.

If you’re a lone wolf developer who prefers a GUI - fine. But then, why pay up for the «pro» service?

I've seen this used by people who are not quite devs but work with devs, as in not-really-technical PMs. They're happy to not have to deal with git, but they still need to see that some API replies with the expected result. They absolutely love postman.

Sure thing, but why not keep the source in git, then distribute to end users, as we do with other software artifacts?

I may be mistaken since I'm not directly a part of this, but the way I understand this works is the other way around: it's the PMs who more or less come up with the API specs / explore upstream APIs, and it's also them who will do the querying. So they're the "first" as well as the "main" users of those collections.

So basically, as they expect to be able to write their own requests and save / share them, they would have to either directly interact with git (which they'd rather avoid - at all) either have the "real devs" provide some kind of functionality similar to postman but backed by git. Needless to say, we're not in the business of developing a postman competitor, so devs have other things to do.

In my experience, people aren't buying the pro version of Postman as solo/indie developers. Companies purchase it for their QA team, or for technical but non-developer roles that need to make requests, share them among teammates, and keep a cloud-sync'd collection of them.

I can recommend https://paw.cloud/ for MacOS

I second this. It’s not open source, yes, but it’s a fair one-time payment. No subscription or anything!

They did shift to a subscription model for team use unfortunately: https://paw.cloud/pricing

And were recently acquired, so likely to continue down that path: https://blog.paw.cloud/paw-joins-forces-with-rapidapi/

My previous company was an early & very heavy user of Paw - with thousands of endpoints in our project. Unfortunately at that scale, it has some major problems, particularly with syncing.

A friend of mine has been working on https://getbeak.app to try and address those problems, but it's quite early stage still

I realize that certain UI patterns are going to inevitably overlap in this space, but this looks like a literal clone of Paw. Seems questionable.

It also does not solve the problem of subscription pricing - it's $25/year with no obvious one-time payment option.

I'm really surprised no one else has mentioned this so far, but Hoppscotch (formerly postwoman) is an excellent open alternative: https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch

How about HTTPie: https://httpie.io/

Well known for the CLI, they now have a web/desktop client as well.

HTTPie is simple to use from command line. I use it for testing our apis.

100% agree. After postman asked me to make an account I uninstalled it and have been building my own. It's not all wired together yet but I'm using this fork of https://github.com/dylanowen/dot-http/tree/wasm-library

I wanted something where I could store and share my requests over git instead of creating some random account. I also wanted the api description to be text not a UI+JSON blob.

I also made this https://github.com/dylanowen/sublime-dot-http

I don't think this is necessarily an alternative to Postman. It is more like an alternative to Fiddler or other mitm network traffic analysis tools oriented around 80/443 HTTP.

The best alternative to Postman is curl coupled with jq and xmllint.

If you like jq, then you might also like jmespath.terminal (jpterm): https://github.com/jmespath/jmespath.terminal

After having used postman for sometime, I realized it favors mouse click based workflow and is very resource heavy. I have switched to emacs verb[1] package and combined with some custom function for env (staging/local) management and org-roam for file management, it's much more comfortable to use. I don't have to learn a new set of shortcuts and can use all the other emacs features.

[1]: https://github.com/federicotdn/verb

I use jupiter notebook. It allows writing and saving requests, in much more convenient(for me) way than postman does

Reply on news.ycombinator.com