Show HN: Kreya, a Postman Alternative | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Kreya, a Postman Alternative

kreya.app

71 pointsCommonGuy49 comments

Hi HN! For over a year we've been working on Kreya. At first, it only supported gRPC, because the alternative tools (eg. BloomRPC) were very limited in their functionality. Since then, we have added many features, trying hard to keep the UI clean while still supporting advanced use cases.

Yesterday, we released Kreya v1.8, which added support for REST!

In our opinion, Kreya is a good alternative to the existing tools out there. Sure, it may not support all the features that Postman has. But we think that Kreya has some innovative approaches (eg. authentication or API importers) that users may find interesting.

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Postman, since they raised money have really lost their way in my opinion. The tool gets harder to use, with a more cluttered UI in every release. Seemingly random UI decisions make it awful to use.

Glad to see competition in the space, but I doubt that Kreya can claim to be a "postman alternative" unless it has 75% feature parity with Postman, simply because the range of ways people use Postman is so broad, that it's an unverifiable claim.

Unless Kreya can do teams, testing, scripting, sharing, reviews, forking, publishing secret-link API docs, generating example API code out of the docs in Ruby/Python/etc, it certainly isn't an _alternative_ to Postman for my team's use-cases.

I really hate the fact that I can no longer save a simple request without putting it into a folder (or "collection" or whatever).

For this exact reason I moved to Insomnia

I've noticed the same thing. Postman has gotten worse over time.

This looks very similar to Insomnia[0]. How does Kreya compare with it?

It also supports generated data, environments, references, and expiring references which might trigger a different http call to get a new value for them.

[0]:https://insomnia.rest/

There are comparison pages in the footer, eg https://kreya.app/comparisons/insomnia

Correct, the Kreya UI is inspired by Insomnia.

Some of the differences are the more complete gRPC support, how API authentication is handled and how the project data is stored.

I'm not interested about gRPC right now.

API auth is complicated in insomnia, but there is a clever way to use variables/env to solve it once and for all. So that's also a non-issue in this comparison.

Insomnia UI/UX is still much better/prettier (Postman is ugly + bad UX).

So the only great point for now is how the data is stored. I don't know why Insomnia hasn't fixed this on their end yet; their sync is so bad because of this.

This point makes me interested in trying out your app but I already have large projects on Insomnia. How can I transfer (import) any of them to quickly give it a go and evaluate? Do you (plan to) support any import feature?

Yeah, where is the import options?

Do you guys think you will only gain new customers that are ready to start from 0?

API auth in Insomnia still needs to be declared for every operation, which is a bit of a hassle (a point Kreya tries to solve).

Import of Insomnia or Postman collections is not yet implemented. However, if you have an OpenAPI/Swagger document, you can import that for a quick start. Or use the Kreya example project to quickly evaluate it.

Honestly, if you’re a VSCode user, just get the “Thunder Client” plugin. Gets the job done, and keeps you in the editor!

Thunder Client is great (https://www.thunderclient.com/)

- Really nice having it integrated into the IDE - Happy with their release cadence - Support/dev has gotten back to me quickly - Does most of the important stuff from Postman imho

And if you need something simple, REST Client in VSCode is great for simple use cases.

Along with that, if you are using IntelliJ (or any flavor of it i.e. Webstorm) you can build out http requests natively in there as well and save them to any file ending in .http

The app consists of a closed-source binary, so not different from Postman in this regard.

Telemetry is opt-out and the gathered data points don't seem problematic to me: https://kreya.app/docs/telemetry/

Yes, Kreya is closed source. We explain our reasons in https://kreya.app/blog/why-kreya-isnt-open-source (which got us mixed responses).

Regarding telemetry, we are very open about what we collect and only use anonymized data.

Mixed responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30527594

People commenting online is a specific subset of the customer base and general population. They will lean open source/anti-business/linux-desktop way more than those things are relevant in the real world. From online discussions one would think desktop linux is incredibly important, when in fact it is pretty irrelevant.

Maybe, and I guess that's great for the commercial potential of a product.

But we, who are paid to make the most informed decisions, have to think harder.

Speaking personally, I use a REST/GraphQL client to test critical parts of an authenticated service. It is often necessary to test with elevated privileges. The consequences of credential leakage can be severe, and could have regulatory implications.

I cannot accept a closed-source tool that sends uninspectable data to a third-party server.

Case-in-point why reading online comments needs to be taken with a heavy grain of salt. Following your needs would lead them into a grave. You are not a customer worth pursuing.

These needs are not incompatible with a marketable product, and in fact make the product viable for larger and more valuable customers.

Open source is not a requirement, but auditability is critical. You can achieve auditability in a number of ways -- open source is just the least costly path.

I have a love - hate relationship with Postman. Mostly because it’s super slow to use. I’ve been trying to find an alternative for long. But Postman has some nice things which it does really well.

1. Variables / Dynamic Variables

2. GraphQL introspection

3. Pre/Post request scripts

4. Collection Runner

Postman is pretty expensive for larger teams.

That makes it horrible to collaborate because then you’d just be sharing giant JSON files which can easily go out of sync between multiple people.

Pre/Post request scripts are also available in Kreya via the Scripting feature (only available in paid versions), which also allows to define tests. A CLI to run these tests and variables (https://github.com/riok/Kreya/issues/23) are currently on the roadmap.

GraphQL may be supported in the future, but we currently plan to expand the core features of Kreya first.

Regarding collaboration, we explicitely designed the Kreya storage model to be easily syncable via git (or your favorite VCS).

I was on the same boat and found Insomnia app pretty good.

If you’re on a Mac, I can recommend Paw (https://paw.cloud) - they have a native client that is super fast, provides great features and advanced dynamic values, and is just a joy to use.

Don’t know about the GraphQL story, however.

Paw has support for GraphQL!

true, I use it for my GraphQL API for a few months now

Adding to the list of alternatives: https://hoppscotch.io/

This is pretty good, was called PostWomen ;-)

We decided to replace Postman and develop our own API Explorer for browsing ServiceStack APIs which is able to provide a simpler, faster and more integrated & customizable UX:

https://docs.servicestack.net/api-explorer

I'd still use Postman for testing 3rd Party APIs, but it provides a subpar UX for calling our own APIs which we can provide a better optimized UX around our USP features, e.g. the "Code" tab walks end user API consumers through how they can easily call each typed API in 9 different supported languages:

https://docs.servicestack.net/api-explorer#code-tab

Shameless plug: There is also Grip (https://gripgrpc.dev/), a native macOS client for gRPC. Maybe check it out if you prefer a proper UI for input/output messages instead of just a large JSON text field. (Disclosure: I’m the author.)

How do you make the site so fast? I am genuinely shocked at how fast each click loads (even first-click). I see some docusaurous and mdx mentions in the source as well as react components, but I am curious how you make it so speedy?

It is a Docusaurus (https://docusaurus.io) site, served on GitLab pages via Cloudflare.

When JavaScript is enabled, Docusaurus pre-fetches links that you hover, resulting in a faster load. So Docusaurus deserves the praise for the fast page loads, we are not doing anything special :)

I like that the product page has comparisons to Postman, Insomnia etc on the bottom, but it could be more on point (e.g. a table).

Overall it looks quite well done, although personally I don't have a real reason to use it over Insomnia.

Thanks for your feedback, we appreciate it and will improve the product comparisons.

We can't deny that Insomnia is a pretty good product :) It has its pros and cons compared to Kreya.

Hey

This looks really cool. The pricing confused me a little to begin with. Pricing per individual vs pricing per user feels sort of the same when at first glanced.

This may just be my silly opinion but thought i'd offer my feedback as it might help.

Thanks for you feedback, it is indeed "sort of the same".

The difference is that with an Enterprise plan, company administrators can handle the (amount of) licenses centrally and distribute the licenses to their employees. The Pro plan is geared towards individuals, meaning they buy one license for themselves.

Wow, is it without electron? You should mention this as another pros

Kreya does not use Electron, but is also web-based. It uses the native web-view of the OS. Read more about it here: https://kreya.app/blog/how-we-built-kreya

Any relation to the character from Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2?

That relation is not on purpose, we found that after we decided on a name.

We went through the list of islands on Wikipedia and changed some letters (and even forgot on which island the name Kreya is based on).

I think you are based in Germany. Was it https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreta ?

Most likely it was Kreta, but we are not 100% sure ourselves.

We are based in Switzerland

I don't understand why people use grpc. There are better ways.

What are your complaints against it, if you don't mind my asking? The reason I ask is that after what I consider pretty careful evaluation of my own needs, I arrived at gRPC as the best solution. Of course it's not the best for every case, but surely there is a reason for its popularity.

All kinds of frameworks and tooling are lacking.

I worked previously with REST/ GraphQL and they have everything I need. Easy way to mock the HTTP 1.1 protocol, easy way to write automation scripts, easy way to debug/customize. Easy for new developers since everybody uses HTTP 1.1. I work with Java and Spring and HTTP 1.1 support is OOTB. For GRPC you have limited tools and unofficial libraries.

When considering an alternative, I was thinking about REST / GraphQL over HTTP2, with a centralized "Type System" and generated models / code (basically GRPC but more user friendly). For me "sending a HTTP2 request with a json payload" seems better and more user friendly than "sending a grpc request"

But now that I looked a bit more into it, seems like HTTP2 might not have a lot of support, so do your own research.

I have no idea what postman (or gRPC) is. Could you add a short explanation in your post?

I'm not the OP, but I found this explanation which might help you.

> Postman is a scalable API testing tool that quickly integrates into CI/CD pipeline. It started in 2012 as a side project by Abhinav Asthana to simplify API workflow in testing and development.

https://www.guru99.com/postman-tutorial.html

Postman is basically GUI curl.

gRPC is a Remote Procedure Call framework

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