Quick list of features:
- Workspaces
- Tabs
- Nested Folders
- Lots of context menus
- Response history
- Plugins
- Runs fully in the browser and runs offline if necessary
- Chrome and Firefox extension to bypass CORS restrictions
- Desktop builds for all platforms
- GraphQL support
- Import collections exported from Postman and Insomnia
- Simple user friendly interface
I built this because I love Insomnia but wanted a portable version that I could run in the browser.If you're tired of Postman's bloated interface and slow startup times, do give this a try.
Unsolicited UX notes…
I read Hacker News on mobile, so tried the app on mobile and ran into some challenges. In order to save space, eliminate the right click, and work on mobile please consider changing:
You can right click here to create a new request or a new folder
To the following (illustrated using pseudo markdown): [Create request] or [Create a folder]
It would also be helpful to replace the GitHub star link with a link to your README. GitHub star links are problematic because they require a login that adds friction that prevents people from getting to your README page. People will login if they decide to star the project, but they might never get to your GitHub if they don’t have time to login or can’t easily login on the device where they’re reading.I did not know about the GitHub star login thing. Will try to rectify it when I can. Thanks for all your UX notes.
I had been hoping to keep all of our APIs centralized in git and run the local (or cloud for our ENVs) from that repo, but it doesn't read any query/API/collection defs from file.
(Not to come off as demanding of OSS, it's a wonderful product, but unfortunately you have to dig deep to figure out the limitations.)
EDIT: Also, what I'd go with now is Thunder client for VS code leveraging API defs stored within each repo + the localized vars such as auth info.
Looks good. I use Postman daily and it sucks, so always open to alternatives.
I don't recall what it looked like the last time you posted, but I wonder if part of the low interest is because upon arrival it doesn't instantly jump out to the visitor that this is something you can host/run locally. It's very easy to miss the Github links top right. And if you don't realise that, then what you see is a third party website expecting you to send your development requests through their UI, which is off-putting.
As I say, I don't remember, but that may be why I skipped it last time. I'll pay more attention this time!
(Edit: split paragraphs for clarity)
The app has been buggy since its first major overhaul, and it now also has incredible feature bloat. It's hard to find what you want, and the UI is constantly pushing you to make use of features you don't want to use. It no longer works well as a scratchpad because they want you to organize everything into a full API IDE, which is not something I want or need.
Restfox https://restfox.dev/
bruno https://github.com/usebruno/bruno
Hoppscotch https://hoppscotch.io/
HTTP Client https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...
Hurl https://hurl.dev
Insomnia https://github.com/Kong/insomnia
Kreya https://kreya.app
Milkman https://github.com/warmuuh/milkman
Nap https://github.com/davesheldon/nap
restclient.el https://github.com/pashky/restclient.el
REST Client https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient
Socketfox https://socketfox.dev
Step CI https://stepci.com
vim-http-client https://github.com/aquach/vim-http-client
vscode-restclient https://github.com/Huachao/vscode-restclient
HoppScotch (47.7k stars, 2019, Vue): https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch
Insomnia (24.2k stars, 2017, React): https://github.com/Kong/insomnia
Restfox (405 stars, 2022, Vue): https://github.com/flawiddsouza/Restfox
bruno (30 stars, 2022, Tauri, Electron, Next): https://github.com/usebruno/bruno
---
You can find more here: https://alternativeto.net/software/postman/
A unique things that seperates bruno from the rest is that it is a "local first" api client.
The collections get stored as folders and files on your local files system (imagine git repo), thereby allowing the developers to use the version control of their choice.
https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/restclient
Not sure how this compares to the more sophisticated tools presented here.
Seems both of them are Postman alternative.
Any other suggestions for web socket testing clients also welcome.
Couldn't understand why this isn't the default.
curl is always available and slapping a display layer on top of something like curl shouldn't need to talk to some backend server.
curl is not installed by default in many distros
Also, I don't think it's possible to call external processes from within the browser sandbox
Which ones (apart from alpine)? I thought curl was pretty much as basic as it got and is always there.
If curl can run locally, so should all of these tools.
Presuming it’s end-to-end, but don’t know about at rest encryption
I have been recently trying out bruno - https://www.github.com/usebruno/bruno
It allows me to save my collection on my filesystem (as folders and files) and I use git to save them in my private repo
It’s free and open-source on GitHub!
Disclaimer: I’m the author
Otherwise great work! needs a little disclaimer though that you will not save any of my requests =)
It should be saving your requests automatically. Maybe your browser is blocking IndexedDB somehow? That's what's used by the application to store the data locally. Also do make sure you're not in incognito mode, as changes will be lost once you're out of it.
Something is missing.
Unless you work on a team that's standardized around it as a collaboration tool.
[Edit]: I'm on Firefox (with ublock origin). I see others having issues too.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/restfox-cors-helpe...
There's also a FF one.
Works fine for me.
Opened a request to https://api.publicapis.org/entries and it fetched results.
In the end, I think hurl [0] is nicer, because it’s open source and it’s a cli tool (and VS code also has a syntax highlighting plugin for it), making it editor independent.
Personally what I do is I script out full API workflows in different files. So one file might login, then POST to add an object, then GET that object off an endpoint, then patch that endpoint, then trigger the GET object again.
Another workflow might login, upload an image, get that image, etc. For me the scripting is what makes this appealing.
But you could setup one file that documents and tests all your endpoints similar to Postman.
Give it a try: https://stepci.com
It's free and open-source on GitHub, built by the community!
Disclaimer: I'm the original author
hurl looks pretty simple to use, and way easier to get started with than what we're using at work currently.
Grantet it does not do everything Postman does but I'm pretty happy so far. Environment variables and secrets stays in a workspace settings.json and the .rest files can be version controlled and shared.
Always bet on text!
Now I can run all my tests FAST locally and set up a CI/CD pipeline in about 15 mins that will pick up and run them as well. At this point I'm not even sure a UI is necessary (maybe for the QA folks--maybe just an import from a postman collection will be enough for them, though).
I actually prefer it.
ETA: I just tried the functionality on Insomnia and I have to admit the UX is nicer. Just paste into the URL bar. Whereas with Postman it's CMD+O, Click on "Raw Text", click in textarea, paste, press import. Insomnia looks to have added OpenAPI support too (it was missing it last time I played with it) so maybe it's time to re-evaluate Insomnia
For those unfamiliar with these plugins, they allow you to simply write text files looking like:
GET https://example.com/posts/5
Accept: application/json
or POST https://example.com/posts
Content-Type: application/json
Authorization: Bearer abc
{"title": "foo", "body": "bar"}
and simply execute the requests from the buffer.There are plenty of great alternatives: HTTPie is one I like. Haven't found a good alternative to CleanMyMac yet though.
It can consume swagger/openapi docs and generate calls. It can generate code snippets and cURL requests. You can extract values from one response body to use as a variable in another request, the built in features go on and on- and there’s a decent extension ecosystem/write your own.
Most importantly, it just works, and it works well and quickly, with pretty much any auth scheme I’ve ever had to deal with.
I’ve only got really a couple of nits with the stand-alone version.
I still can’t figure out how to make it “use the same auth scheme” for every single request globally. Each request requires the auth config, but this is solved by just copying an existing request and starting from that. This could very well be my lack of knowledge, though I feel like I know the tool well.
The .paw file is binary and doesn’t do well checked into source control if you’ve got more than one person using it.
The Teams version, which requires a monthly sub kinda/sorta mimics a git style branch strategy for merging different members changes and handles the team problem pretty well.
All in all though, it is absolutely and BY FAR the best request tool I’ve ever used. A great combination of simple just get out of the way and advanced automation strategies. I use it every day.
EDIT TO ADD:
I forgot to mention their license is still a lifetime license. I paid them $50, probably 6 years ago now, and have never been forced to pay them another dime. I’d pay per major version or do the IntelliJ perpetual fallback if it came to it, but I’ve never once been bait and switched (looking at you Tower2).
(No affiliation.)
It’s a solid app and worth it if you’ll use it a lot. I simply didn’t because piling things in there isn’t particularly valuable if it isn’t readily available to the people I work with.
Depends on how much you value a tool like this. And it's a one-time purchase for life, not a subscription.
Use plain text files (IntelliJ already introduced .http files, which work great) Sadly it will never work because that would break 90% of the incentives to pay, which his having a sync system. Because then I could simply commit my http requests and git would be my sync server.
Personally I don't like the IntelliJ Client, the UI is kind of ugly and requires a lot of actions each time I want to send and review a response. Insomnia is way better in that regard.
Good context might me my issue comment on Hoppscotch: https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch/issues/870#issuecom...
Early days but would love some feedback if you get a chance to try it out.
The market is overcrowded by good solutions, best wishes to other tools!
I’ve a very early prototype. If you get a chance to try it out, please do and share your feedback.
GET https://httpbin.org/get
> {%
client.global.set("my_cookie", response.headers.valuesOf("Set-Cookie")[0]);
%}
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/exploring-http-syntax.ht...Nice to have a file with some calls to make right in the client. Can take those to an outside app if needed.
The command line fucking SUCKS for sending anything beyond basic HTTP requests.
>> import requests