Ask HN: What's the Best Postman Alternative?
My team is looking to migrate away from Postman as our API client because it has become very bloated and slow.
What alternatives can you recommend?
What alternatives can you recommend?
That said, I’ve found Postman extension for VSCode to be preferable to their GUI
- Easy to find things in your shell history with fzf
- curl supports everything you may need HTTP-wise.
One of my favourite curl snippets:
curl -vvv 'https://google.com' \
-w "==============\n\n | dnslookup: %{time_namelookup}\n | connect: %{time_connect}\n | appconnect: %{time_appconnect}\n | pretransfer: %{time_pretransfer}\n | starttransfer: %{time_starttransfer}\n | total: %{time_tot
al}\n | size: %{size_download}\n | HTTPCode=%{http_code}\n\n"
| dnslookup: 0.033616
| connect: 0.234668
| appconnect: 0.512112
| pretransfer: 0.277686
| starttransfer: 0.307353
| total: 0.308548
| size: 220
Good clients of this sort (Postman, yes, but also its competitors) will often offer some mix of:
- Better secrets management (they don't end up in your shell history); not necessarily encrypted but usually something like an internal .env file
- Organization into folders
- Sharing and collaboration with teammates
- Import/export to/from external API specs
- Recording example responses, both successes and failures
- The ability to chain together several requests with data passed them them (e.g. create new user, login as that user, fetch a request as that user, validate response contains json.data.blah_blah[0].blahblah
- Export/import to and from curl commands, JS fetch calls, etc.
- All of that in a GUI that is easy to use and teach
They are invaluable if you have teams working together on API designs or testing. They can be very helpful for quickly tinkering with and debugging API responses without having to write a bunch of unit tests or scripts (where you might not necessarily want the overhead of dealing with curl commands manually or writing basic HTTP calls over and over in a programming language).
It's really a big time saver... in the teams that I've been on, it lets us create folders full of actual API endpoint examples to give to frontend devs who can see what the backend is supposed to do when it succeeds, along with example responses for different failure states. It makes developing a functional app a lot easier than trying to parse all that out from a shitty Confluence page or whatever.
check https://www.google.com/search?q=alternatives+to+postman+site...
[1]: https://httpie.io/
Jetbrains also has a HTTP client built in, but it's not as easy to use.
I switched when Postman was trying to get me to sign up for their cloud in order to migrate to a new laptop.