Top 5 Best Postman Alternatives for API Testing

Postman is a collaboration platform for API development.  They also support Automated Testing.  You can write test scripts for your Postman API requests in JavaScript.  But their pricing and documentation are very complex.  This creates a need to look at some Postman alternatives for API Testing.  It is difficult to fit all the Postman pricing details on one page:

The documentation for Postman is managed through an open-source Github repository.  This repository has over 100 contributors.  It is very thorough, with many people involved.  The documentation itself has been forked almost 300 times:

With the goal of simplicity let’s look at top alternatives to Postman for API testing (and other Postman-like tools).

Top Alternatives to Postman for API Testing

1. RapidAPI API Testing
2. Paw
3. Apigee
4. Assertible
5. Insomnia Rest Client

1. RapidAPI API Testing

First, let’s review the API Testing product offered by RapidAPI.  API Testing offers Comprehensive Testing, Global Monitoring, and Seamless Integration.  The main differences between the free version and paid plans are these two features:

1. Number of API calls allowed
2. CI/CD integration.  Paid plans include a dedicated webhook to run API tests from 3rd party CI/CD pipelines. The webhook works with Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub, Travis CI, and GitLab.

The pricing plans for RapidAPI Testing are simple to understand and fit easily on one page:

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Data-Driven Testing is an integral part of the Global Monitoring of RapidAPI Testing.  The global performance monitoring and execution reports provide valuable data. You can feedback this data into test development.

Browse Top API Monitoring Tools

There are three ways to create tests:

1. Automatic test creation using API Definitions. This is a very powerful feature. RapidAPI Testing’s Automatic Testing Generation tool infers the properties of an API.  It then lets you create a test based on the properties right away.
2. Drag and Drop visual test editor.  This visual test editor requires no code so non-programmers can create tests!
3. Code-based test editor.  For times when you know exactly what you want but it’s too complex to visualize easily. This is for the power users or those who do not trust GUIs. 🙂

REST, SOAP, and GraphQL test types are all supported.  Security testing includes authentication and authorization.  The options for those are OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect.  Also, there is header validation, commands to prevent SQL Injection, and more.

2. Paw

Next, we will review the features and pricing of Paw.  Paw has some similarities to Guzzle in making it easy to send and receive HTTP requests.  It is a universal tool for API design, development, and testing.  It is developed within a native Mac interface but a Beta is now available for Windows & Linux.  This provides anyone in that environment a familiar interface.  The features include:

• Authentication handling out of the box, with custom extensions possible
• Ability to use credentials from your OS X keychain
• Environment control with dynamic variables
• Cookies and Session management to allow chaining requests
• Export APIs to other common formats like Swagger, Postman, or RAML
• Save request and response history as repeatable commands called Pawprints
• Build your own extensions, limited only by your imagination!

Pricing for Paw is simple, $49.99 gets you a perpetual license for one user on 3 devices at the same time. Also, see RapidAPI Design by Paw.

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3. Apigee

Third, we will review Google Apigee.   Google was a pioneer in simple design with their first home page being mostly empty and it still is to this day.  Apigee is an API Management Tool allowing for full lifecycle management of APIs.  API Testing is just part of that lifecycle.  I found only one mention of testing APIs on the Apigee overview page.  This was in the context of developer portals.

When I looked at the information about Apigee developer portals I was not impressed. I found that the idea is for you to create them yourself.  There is no built in testing environment for APIs in Apigee.  But there are 2 ways to create your own portal where people can test their own APIs.  One option is using Drupal. If you are familiar with Drupal that’s great, otherwise skip that option. The other option is to create your own portal using Apigee APIs to integrate with their services.

But I noticed at the top of the Apigee documentation page a note about different versions of Apigee.  So I clicked on the Edge version (which may or may not be newer than the X version, I could not tell).  This took me to a completely different interface. This other page has a different logo, color scheme, and UI like it is a different site altogether:

The Apigee Edge product links back to the Apigee X product when you find the pricing link hidden in a dropdown.  So you might have to pay for both together although they seem very different.  At this point, simplicity does not come to mind when trying to understand Apigee. Moving on…

Browse Apigee alternatives

4. Assertible

Next, let’s look at Assertible.  The title of the home page makes this claim: “The easiest way to test and monitor your web services”.  Now that sounds simple, doesn’t it?  Let’s see how it works.

While reviewing the documentation for Assertible I found an article relevant to this topic.  It explains why to choose Assertible over Postman for API Testing. Some of the key points are like RapidAPI Testing. For example, the useful API dashboard view and built-in assertions do not need code.

Some of the key features of Assertible include the following:

• Connect an Assertible web service to GitHub. This allows you to automate testing after deploying code.
• Import Swagger/OpenAPI spec or Postman Collection to automatically create a webservice.
• Organizations can be created to allow teams to work together on APIs.

Most of these alternative tools we are reviewing can be used with the same APIs.  First, you can create one tool and then transfer it to another to run tests.  Then you can transfer to another to integrate with CI/CD.

The pricing for Assertible is easy to digest, with 4 plans and only 5 factors that change between plans!

5. Insomnia

Finally, we will discuss Insomnia. Insomnia is an API Client and Design tool.  Insomnia Inso is a command-line tool for enabling automated testing.

The tagline starts with “Build and test APIs quickly…” which may be true once you are familiar with how it all works.  But the documentation itself is lacking in organization.  There are 2 pages of article links for the “Using Insomnia” category for example. Subcategories or more top-level categories would help users keep track of things.

We are looking for Alternatives to Postman for API Testing due to the complexity of Postman. This is a random collection of all the articles about using insomnia in one category. That is not a step in the right direction.

With that said, let’s look at some of the key features offered by Insomnia.  We will refer to Inso as part of insomnia because the pricing does not differentiate the two.  Here are key features Insomnia offers:

• API Testing and CI/CD integration using a command line tool.  Inso is built in Node.js and hosted on Github as an open source library.
• Manage multiple environments with environment variables for credentials
• Multi-protocol support – REST, SOAP, GraphQL, GRPC
• Code snippet generation in several languages

Pricing for Insomnia is simple, there are only 3 plans. There are very few explanations needed for the differences between them:

Read more about Insomnia vs Postman

Summary: Postman vs RapidAPI vs Paw vs Apigee vs Assertible vs Insomnia

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