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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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…
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.
Yeah. Pretty much. As one of the folks who could code a new solution in go in a weekend, I have not - because curl plus some trivial one-liners in Bash, Python or PowerShell is already a 90% solution to what I need.
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.
It got enshittified. I went to use it one day and it wouldn’t work without creating an account.
