Hey!
I’m currently hitting the limits with Postman’s free tier and need your recommendations for alternatives. My company isn’t planning to upgrade to the paid version, so I’m specifically looking for:
Must-have features:
- Unlimited API requests
- Collection runner or similar batch testing capability
- Data import from spreadsheets for test automation
- The collection runner feature is crucial for my workflow: I heavily rely on being able to import Excel data to generate and map multiple API calls without manual setup.
Has anyone switched from Postman to something else that offers these capabilities? What’s your experience been like?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions! 🙏
It’s branded as Bruno the dog, because the dog is the enemy of the postman.
I am disappointed about their recent switch to a subscription model though. They quietly removed the single-time purchase “Golden Edition” and introduced multiple subscriptions. Not a good start, let’s see if the enshittification continues like with all API testing tools.
As long as they have a FLOSS version, I don’t really care how often they change their mind about that other stuff, it’s still solid forkable value gifted to the community. To me, that stuff might as well not exist, and if it were important enough, then a fork would spring up adding those features.
That’s hilarious. I remember Bruno being sold as the better tool because it had no subscription, and they switched to being evil in less than a year.
Curl. Everything you described is not hard to do via scripts. I use it every day for all of my API testing needs. You’re also not limited to the features Postman provides.
This is like telling someone who needs a new table saw that they can use a handsaw.
Like sure it works great, but it’s going to be a long process getting things done compared to something like postman.
It does not take long to use curl, not sure what you’re talking about. There’s not particularly special about what Postman does.
It’s almost 30 years old. Not to knock cURL, it’s a staple for sure.
HTTPie and xh claim to have a more intuitive UX. If the functionality is comparable, I choose tools written in memory-safe languages by default.
How would you test a GraphQL API with curl?
EDIT: Nevermind I just looked it up and I’ll just stick with postman for now.
If you use VSCode, Rest client is so much better than Postman. Requests are simple text files that area easy to edit, version and share with others
I use this as well. In fact, I have an instance of VSCode running only for access to the extension library - I do most of my editing in Android Studio, but manage Git interactions and things like Rest Client in VSCode.
I’ve been working on my own version of Rest API test client, it relies on self executing TOML files, that can be save into a git repository, it currently has unlimited API requests, will be under a 0BSD license.
It currently does not do batch script or data import from spreadsheet or csv, but I can work that feature in, that should be easy to do in Python.
It currently supports arguments and pipelining http responses into a http request. I suppose I could use the pipelining system to do the data import!
It relies on adapters, those will take care of authentication like oAuth and provide the header to merge into the request.
It will be broken down into edition to keep it easy to maintain, current working on JSON edition, but will do XML edition sometime in the future. I really want to stay close to the Unix philosophy!
I did it out of frustration of Postman and other Electron based counterparts. But also I’m doing it because it fun 😁
