Best Alternative to Postman?
Best Alternative to Postman?
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! 🙏
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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 seems to me that you may not have never tried anything other than basic calls if you think this is the case.
Edit: to clarify that I’m only questioning your usage of postman, not you as a developer
Like what?
I make backends, very complex, yet curl does it all, headers, files, any data, whatever.
Need to test an API? Swagger will help everyone.
You need reproducible tests? Write feature tests.
Need to do many requests to achieve a business goal? Put it into a script. Shell is sufficient for basic needs, use anything that can be interpreted for anything more complex. Though at that point you should have an app to handle distributed states, which is never a fun time.
Those are all things you could do, but all of that is baked into one tool that is far easier to use. I never said curl couldn’t do it.
BTW, I make backends too, but I try to make them simple and easy to use. I guess that’s where our design philosophy differs. I don’t see complexity as a positive.
You want to tell me that Postman/whatever is a replacement for feature tests or Swagger?
Oh hell naw
If a person needs to process an entire kitchen worth of lumber, then yes, tablesaw. If, however, a person needs to build one simple box and also learn how the wood fits together and practice their skills, then handsaw.
xhis a nice modern alternative.What's not modern about curl?
It's almost 30 years old. Not to knock cURL, it's a staple for sure.
HTTPie and
xhclaim to have a more intuitive UX. If the functionality is comparable, I choose tools written in memory-safe languages by default.If being over 30 is "not modern", OK, sure, but that's a bit subjective.
The fuctionality is hardly comparable, cURL supports many protocols. As for memory safety it's trendy and modern but it hardly makes sense to rewrite such a project in a memory-safe language. It's been tried though (for some components) and the project lead's open to that.
https://daniel.haxx.se/docs/curl-vs-httpie.html
Httpie and xh only have a small subset of curl's functionality, and IMO the claims of more intuitive UX is dubious at best. More magical and limiting is what I would say. Httpie in particular is slow as hell, too.
Daniel has a more thorough comparison of features across different alternatives here: https://curl.se/docs/comparison-table.html
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.
The same way you test any other API. Not really different. I tend to keep my request bodies in separate files organized in folders to keep things tidy.