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.
Ha ha!
Wow… I feel dumb. I’ve used Bruno for over a year now and never noticed.
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.
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.
Same - As an Insomnia refugee, I thought “Oh no, not this again” and felt foolish for evangelising it.
wait, really?? bruno is chill and i bought the lifetime. it really was billed as an alternative to that model
I thought we didn’t talk about Bruno.
Yes, Bruno is great! The only downside is that everytime I start it, I have that damn Disney song stuck in my head 😆
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
Also my go-to, I prefer everything in version control instead of someone else’s cloud.
IIRC, Pycharm can also inject the same .rest files.
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.
All I want is to make API requests with whatever headers but no fucking Electron so the app loads before the heat death of the universe… Please, please
curl?
I’m genuinely wondering, if this is a situation where the open-source community just uses curl and that’s why there’s only corporate gunk for those who want more features. For example, curl obviously won’t support Excel import, but folks in the open-source community are also very unlikely to want that…
You can easily write a script to make curl requests from a CSV.
Depending on exactly what you mean by importing from excel, there are libraries for Perl/Python/your scripting language of choice that will simplify that so it becomes a matter of a fairly small amount of code to build a test harness that does exactly what you want.
Well, OP mentioned an Excel import, so I’m not 100% sure what that means either. 🙃
But yeah, that’s part of why I’m wondering. I hardly know anything about Postman, so I’m probably underestimating how complex this would be, but it still feels like at least the core feature-set could easily be covered by an open-source tool, if anyone in the open-source community had that itch to scratch.
Maybe it’s also just solving a problem that only companies have? The webpage mentions some things about centrally managing API definitions. Do not ask me why the API definitions are not in a repo. But I guess, if you join a company that works like that, you’re not going lean up against that…
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.
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.
It’s been a while but insomnia used to be my go to
It got enshittified. I went to use it one day and it wouldn’t work without creating an account.
Aw man that really sucks. I moved to it back in the day after Postman got enshittified. The cycle continues I suppose
Ah shit. Time to make something from scratch then.
I use insomnia but many of the updates to it disrupt my workflow. I should probably find something else.
I use an organized git repo full of curl shell scripts 🤷
Have you tried Hoppscotch yet?
This is my official recommendation. It aims to be a drop-in replacement of Postman. They don’t have pre/post-execution scripts at the collection level (only at the request level) and there are a few other features missing but they are making pretty good progress.
I say official because I was on my company’s committee to switch to a new API tool. Though I personally felt that we should have just paid for Postman. But our business risk team didn’t like the terms that Postman had.
Hopscotch is the one I’ve been recommending, but it has a “use us before we also enshitify” vibe, so I’m going to check out Insomnium, the open fork of Insomnia.
I’m a fan of HTTPie
https://httpie.io/ check this one, they have both command line and also desktop application, but not sure if it covers all your requirements.
If you like curl, hurl might be an option
Milkman. It’s simple and I’ve seen bugs where it hangs, but overall it works well, doesn’t require a login, runs local, is open source, supports postman import, and exports to a nice variety of formats
Didn’t see you mention platform so on the off chance you are using a mac I personally use Paw / RapidAPI. The nice thing about it is that it’s a native mac app instead of electron. https://paw.cloud/
Every app in this space tends to get enshittified, so I just use shell scripts to do API calls nowadays. I used Insomnia and Postman in the past.
Just moved to Apidog three month ago, better than Postman I think, and free too.
Apidog is the best in terms of UI. I use it regularly and love it.
Thunder client for VS Code.
