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

I like Insomnia myself

Yeah it’s called curl lol

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.

Hoppscotch is pretty cool

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.

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

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

Insomnia user here too, I’ve found it to be simple,clean and to my taste.

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).

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 😁