I am a fan of Insomnia. As far as I can tell it has most of the features I used in postman without all the paid upgrade nags

Insomnia is pretty cool and open-source

Yeah it’s called curl lol

I completely stopped using all those clients. We now just store the requests alongside the code in an http file and use the built in IntelliJ HTTP Client to make the call. No need for a separate program, integrates with your code, you can save responses to make sure they don’t change, it’s all stored in git. There’s a ton of benefits and not many downsides.

I like Insomnia myself

Insomnia is great and has an easy, simple interface. But I feel like creating complex collections with different environments is a lot simpler with postman

Hoppscotch is pretty cool

Another vote for Insomnia here. I used to use Insomnia primarily until a lot of my work switched over to gRPC and I’ve found that Postman works a lot better for that. I still prefer Insomnia for the simple UX and speed, just wish it had better gRPC support.

I mostly use httpie on the fish shell with autocompletion for quick requests, but it’s no replacement

I’m using the vscode extension called Thunderclient

I usually generate an API client in C#, and just use that. For example, and entire integration CRUD test for a user would just be something like:

var user = TestClient.CreateUser(1234, "Bob");
user.Id.ShouldBe(1234);
user.Name.ShouldBe("Bob");

var userThroughGet = TestClient.GetUser(1234);
userThroughGet.ShouldNotBeNull();

TestClient.EditUser(1234, "John");
userThroughGet = TestClient.GetUser(1234);
userThroughGet.Name.ShouldBe("John");

TestClient.DeleteUser(1234);
userThroughGet = TestClient.GetUser(1234);
userThroughGet.ShouldBeNull();

Trying to set up those kinda scenarios quickly with Postman was getting pretty tedious

I’m saying that Postman is bad. maybe not in terms of functionality, but damn if it doesn’t run like a slug on my work computer, which is just fine handling a dozen Visual Studio and Rider instances. It seems like it works perfectly for about 5 minutes and then goes to crap.

So yeah, I’d be interested in an alternative too. I only really use it for basic functionality (creating, sharing, and running collections of requests with configurable parameters).

Insomnia, or if you really love the command line and dont need to document or save your API requests, curl (don’t recommend this for anything beyond simple testing).

I recommend Visual Studio Code and one of the following two extensions:

• Thunder Client
• REST Client

Either one isn’t really the full picture - you’ll ned to combine it with other extensions - such as a good JSON language extension (which will give you syntax highlighting, error checking, code folding/etc.

The most important extension is CoPilot. That’s the killer feature which makes Visual Studio Code vastly better than Postman.

Thunder is very similar to Postman. Not much to say other than it works well, it’s free, millions of people use it.

It’s not really my cup of tea, but I do think it’s better than Postman because you can use your own version control servers to collaborate with colleagues, which is generally better (and cheaper) than Postman’s collaboration service in my opinion (you get diffs, code review, pull requests, history, etc etc for all your most important API tests).

Personally I prefer REST Client (also free, and has even more users than Thunder).

REST Client is really simple. It adds a new “HTTP” text file type. You simply type a HTTP request into the file and hit a hotkey (or click a button) to execute the request. And it shows you the response. Easy.

HTTP requests and responses are just plain text, and you can simply save those as files in your project. REST Client also has basic support for variables, API credentials, etc. Not quite as user friendly as Postman or Thunder Client, but it makes up for that by being straightforward and flexible.

CoPilot Chat, works with both, but having everything in plain text gives it more control over REST Client than Thunder Clinet you can write (and edit) your requests with a series of simple plain english prompts. E.g. “JSON request with a blog post body” will give you:

POST https://example.com/blog/posts
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "title": "My First Blog Post",
    "body": "This is the content of my first blog post. It's not very long, but it's a start!",
    "author": "John Doe",
    "tags": ["blogging", "first post"]
}

You might follow that up with “Add a UUID” or “Add a JWT auth header”.

Copilot can answer questions too - e.g. “How do I unsubscribe a user with the Mailchimp API?” They use the “HTTP PATCH” request type - WTF.

I’m the maintainer of HTTP Toolkit - it’s not a Postman alternative (it’s an open source project focused on intercepting & debugging traffic, not sending it) but I’m actually working on building a UI for exactly this right now, so this thread is perfectly timed!

Is there anything that any of you really love or hate about any of the tools suggested here?

What core features beyond just “edit method+URL+headers+body, send, view the response status+headers+body” are essential to you?

Anything you wish these tools could do better?

I’m planning on taking the client functionality live within a few weeks max, so if you want to help your perfect Postman alternative come to life now’s the moment 😁