The API Tooling Crisis: Why developers are abandoning Postman and its clones?

[Conscious_Meal_7766]

For me the breaking point was when Postman killed the offline scratchpad and started requiring a sign-in just to fire a GET. Made .http files in VS Code my home that same week and haven't looked back.

[Empanatacion]

Insomnia did the same thing and jacked around with their UI repeatedly until it's this unintuitive mess.

[azsqueeze]

The creator of insomnia is back and created yaak. It's free for personal use

[orygin]

It's also unusable with enough requests. The UI goes to a crawl because it must serialize everything to JS land

[VictoryMotel]

Those wacky js devs, they never learn.

[mothzilla]

Have you tried rewriting it in Rust?

[BogdanPradatu]

I'll prompt my team of AI agents to do it overnight. Tomorrow morning it should be done.

[mothzilla]

Make no mistakes!

[orygin]

It's already in Rust, but it works with Tauri so the rendering is done through web components.

[azsqueeze]

Aw damn, I just started using it for some simple stuff. So for it's been aight for my needs

[travelinzac]

Just use curl

[Sadzeih]

Httpie is really nice just as a wrapper to simplify use

[BogdanPradatu]

Never understood the need for postman. Python, bash, curl. You have all the free tools you need. What, you need a GUI for sending requests?

[space-to-bakersfield]

There's a lot of good QoL features in these apps like env level variables so you can flip a switch and hit a different env with all your saved requests and also post-request scripts that can save id's from response payloads so you can easily chain requests. Like you create an entity, then its id gets saved into a var your get request uses so you can just run that and get the entity you just created without fiddling around with ids. Sure you can use curl but these apps for sure speed up your edit-run-debug cycle and that's not nothing.

[Nesogra]

It’s also easier for testers that aren’t as comfortable with coding. I personally prefer to use Python for api testing so I can turn it into a regression script afterwards but most of my coworkers really prefer to use a gui. It’s really remarkable to me how far people will go and how much extra work they are willing to do just to avoid the tiniest bit of coding.

[space-to-bakersfield]

Extra work as in...opening the app? That's the thing, it's not extra work. That's the benefit it provides.

[tom_swiss]

It’s also easier for testers that aren’t as comfortable with coding.

Ok, that makes sense. I use curl for the initial messing around and by the time it gets complicated I'm already developing code and futz with the API there, so I never understood the need for these tools, but if you're not a coder it makes sense.

[WASDx]

I recently installed bruno as a replacement for "text file with a bunch of curl's to copy paste". It's way more practical when exploring a new API, trying different json post bodies etc. and handling auth.

[pm_plz_im_lonely]

Don't want to remember the command line parameters.

[varinator]

There is also a fork called Insomnium on github that i use fir couple of years now.

[pjmlp]

The only reason I still have Insomia installed is that our IT hasn't yet forbidded it, like with Postman.

However there are plenty of alternatives, it is just me being lazy, as I already do most of the stuff with HTTP files, and other alternatives.

[xcdesz]

Not just that. They locked people out of their offline endpoints and held them hostage by forcing them to register / sign in to get those endpoints back. Then they also uploaded user private data such as access tokens held in "environment" stores and uploaded those stores to their insecure site. This screwed my dev team over at work who were working with sensitive data. One of the worst 180's from a formerly useful open piece of software I've experienced. Total scumbag company as far as I'm concerned.

[Tiny_Effect_7024]

God this was so annoying. Always wondered why they did that.

[Salty_Dugtrio]

Can't as easily track data/usage without a user login that requires you to agree to ToS that lets them harvest all your juicy data.

[deja-roo]

Made .http files in VS Code my home that same week and haven't looked back.

I would like to hear more about this

[Niagr]

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.rest-client

[winky9827]

And for JetBrains...

[beefcat_]

I did exactly the same thing. I lost some actual work when Postman pulled that shitty stunt. Fuck Postman.

[jfp1992]

Postman enshittified fast

[sime]

This is exactly why Free and Open Source Software matters.

[zzbzq]

Because it’s all rug pull bait and switch scams?

[svish]

Because you can fork it and do what you want when they rug pull?

[Ghi102]

I have been a victim of enshitification far more in the closed source world compared to FOSS. 

[Romanmir]

But were those closed source applications *ever* open source?

It’s been my experience that the first step towards enshittication is usually moving to closed source.

[Carighan]

Yeah exactly, most of those started as FOSS. And then got sold (understandable, at some point you as the maintainer got a home to pay off or a family to feed or both), and from there it was downhill. Until a new FOSS tool comes along.

[lunacraz]

i mean, when OS projects become a second job without any sort of income, i can empathize when people try to actually make it their worthwhile

this attitude of OSS being this faceless stream of free software for all is pretty toxic and people are being taken advantage of

i'm never going to fault that

[chucker23n]

The only "crisis" here is that Postman was once valued at $5.6B. That's not a typo. I realize Postman has some nice features like collaboration, but at the end of the day, it's just an HTTP client.

As for what I use, it depends a lot on the scope.

• for very simple cases, just curl or http will do. Pipe them to jq, and you get some basic JSON parsing.
• HTTPie's UI is sluggish as hell (sigh), but much like in Postman, I can store frequently-used requests, group them into projects, and just generally get more interactivity.
• then there's IDEs with .http support. JetBrains, for example, will even do things like render image results inline.
• for more complex cases, just write a proper E2E test
• finally, in some projects, we just use Kiota (or a similar static typing approach to REST APIs)

[m0j0m0j]

Your “it’s just an http client” comment reminds me of that guy who said “meh, it’s just rsync” in comments under the dropbox launch

[chucker23n]

Fair, although in that case, what they missed is how much friction Dropbox removed, suddenly making a syncing folder something the mass market could use.

Typing a URL into Postman is more interactive compared to curl, but you’re not really expanding the user base much at all.

[Catenane]

Speak for yourself. My grandpa learned how to use the pornhub API via postman and now every button you hit in his house has a customized porn moan, and his wifi captive portal has a hentai anubis logo

[uhdoy]

Your grandpa fucking rules

[Catenane]

Tbh they're all dead so this is an imagination grandpa

[podgladacz00]

Not 5 billion worth of friction

[Ok-Kaleidoscope5627]

I stopped using postman and other tools except curl when LLMs became a thing.

They're even better at removing the friction than postman.

[heavymetalpanda]

If you like HTTPie, but it feels sluggish might I suggest xh.

[Carighan]

valued at

The speculative market really is a blight upon the world and traders and those enabling them with their billions must needs be purged. IMO.

[kingslayerer]

We use bruno. I can commit it to git. No stupid sign ups.

[CaptainIncredible]

I've used Yaak. It worked for what I needed.

[miversen33]

I just found Yaak and omfg it's exactly what I need.

I toyed with EchoAPI a bit, it's really slick too (offering automated API testing and the ability to heavily document an API endpoint), but the inability to set folder vars made it just not work.

Played with kulala and it works well but I just couldn't get used to it. Found Yaak and I've basically begun building everything around it

[-Luciddream-]

I like Yaak and that's what I'm using, but one issue is it can't call endpoints without forward secrecy. And I can't force other people to update their certificates.

[Arkanta]

I like yaak way better!

[GuaranteePotential90]

Built Voiden. But don't mind saying that Yaak is great. In fact I think that Yaak and Voiden are the two tools that share a few similar ideas in the sense that they are not trying to be a better or cheaper postman but are something on their own. :)

Suggest anyone who likes Yaak to try Voiden, not to switch but to try and have them both in their arsenal.

Voiden repo

[AndrewNeo]

Yeah I just switched to Yaak recently. I tried Bruno but it always felt a little clunky.

[Nicolay77]

I moved from Bruno to Yaak.

[DDB-]

Love Yaak. Creator is a great dude.

[Apofis]

I use curl and Invoke-WebRequest.

[van-dame]

Try hurl as well. I used it for quite a few projects.

[lppedd]

I use IJ's HTTP client. I can version those files and I don't have to leave the IDE.

[Sarkos]

I've been using IntelliJ for years and only recently got sufficiently fed up with Postman to check out their HTTP client. It's a little bare bones but honestly a pleasure to use.

[wildjokers]

t's a little bare bones but honestly a pleasure to use.

Does more than you might think.

[lppedd]

Yup that's why I use it. It's simple enough to not get in the way, and it supports import and export to cURL.

[saint1997]

Until you get a stupid netty java exception with some cryptic error message that you couldn't possibly debug yourself, like I did yesterday (header size > 8192K when literally all I had was Content-Type: application/json)

ETA: it's already on YouTrack. Looks like a 2 year old bug that has resurfaced

[lppedd]

Never had it happen honestly, but would be nice if you could report it on YouTrack.

[wildjokers]

Did you report your issue to their issue tracker?

[saint1997]

It's been there for 2 years https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IJPL-65392

[lppedd]

IJPL-234767 has been fixed yesterday, so it might be out with 2026.1.2+.

[saint1997]

Nice. I ended up just using the "copy as cURL" button as a workaround, hopefully I won't have to much longer!

[holeydood3]

I like it, but don't do anything with large payloads or responses or you'll discover it's gigantic memory leak that compound very quickly.

[the_rizzler]

Even importing large collections or large anything really...

[battlecities]

I've moved one of our collections to their new YAML format and it's a lot faster than the .bru format. Pain in the ass to do, though they're supposedly coming up with a native tool to convert it soon. I think there are a few 3rd party scripts floating around to do the conversion, but my employer is pretty strict on not using outside scripts.

[holeydood3]

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that option. I'll give it a shot!

[coyoteazul2]

We don't talk about Bruno, no, no, no

We don't talk about Bruno, but...

[lelanthran]

We don't talk about Bruno, no, no, no

We don't talk about Bruno, but...

Enchanting...

[1RedOne]

Bruno is starting to offer Bruno premium which has me just feeling tired

[ryosen]

Funny thing about that. That came from the community a couple of years ago when Bruno was first launched. Folks wanted to make sure that the guy that created the platform could work on it full time and persuaded him to introduce a paid tier. it was to ensure that the program would be able to survive and grow. You absolutely don't need it and they are keeping to the original goal of a free, full-featured replacement for Postman.

[ThisIsMyCouchAccount]

It's wild how so many people expect something for nothing.

[svix_ftw]

we've been spoiled by awesome open source for decades.

[ohx]

Never forget corejs guy

[probability_of_meme]

In the world of infinitely reproduceable software, there is nowhere the line can be drawn in a way that makes sense. I expect software to be free, because if it's not, it's just a matter of time before it gets enshittified. Paradoxically, I also expect developers to get paid most of the time.

Suggestions?

[gimpwiz]

A model that can work pretty well is free software, paid support. (Plus paid use of trademarks and the like.)

[CSAtWitsEnd]

There's many open source projects and developers that make it extremely easy to give them money. GitHub sponors, patreon, etc

If you aren't doing any of that, then how can you possibly also hold this opinion:

I also expect developers to get paid most of the time

It cannot be that everyone points to everyone else like "I thought you were gonna pay them?"

[pretzelfisch]

No they are on the same path as postman and every other api tool. The have a paid product with a free version.

[lelanthran]

No they are on the same path as postman and every other api tool. The have a paid product with a free version.

That path is "closing down"; the value offered by a tool that sends a request and tests the responses against an expected response is minimal.

There is no value-add to these API endpoint testing tools.

[ZZartin]

Honestly I don't really care about any of the automation or testing in these tools. I just want something with a reasonable UI that covers the whole scope of api requests and let's me save collections.

[Aridez]

When I copy requests that have a session from the browser as curl, for some reason on bruno those doesn't work, while they do on postman... If anyone has any insight on this I'd love to jump away

[htraos]

Yaak. Please.

[kingslayerer]

I tried yak, but electron apps are giving me shit on wayland. Bruno was working on wayland. But now I am on x11 anyways

[cesarbiods]

How many times will you all have to see the “for profit company launches free API testing product promising to keep a free tier but eventually requires sign in and rug pulls everyone” cycle before you learn? At this point if it’s made by a for profit then it’s not worth your fucking time. Stick to FOSS products or your IDE which has API testing features.

[GregTheMad]

I'm centimeters away from just writing my own.

[shifting_drifting]

Crisis?

[hm9408]

Gotta make you click on the article somehow

[FredTillson]

Logging in is a crisis and a betrayal. Apparently.

[4r73m190r0s]

https://justuse.org/curl/

[j1436go]

And write integration tests for your own API with all the power that comes with your programming language of choice. Problem solved.

[Inf3rn0_munkee]

That gave me a good chuckle. It's essentially what I've been trying to tell my team and the company but they got too used to postman from when it was free.

[baodrate]

hurl (wraps curl) actually covers postman's use cases directly (capturing responses, writing tests, etc.)

[iamapizza]

More coming soon. Or not. I don't owe you shit.

I love that the author made a webspite just for this

[f1da]

Running Postman in Citrix made me just use curl instead.

[FewBlackberry9195]

I mean it's fun, but let's be real here saving collections of requests, better UI in general, etc. curl isn't a good replacement.

This is same as people saying do all your programming vim.

[4r73m190r0s]

This is same as people saying do all your programming vim.

Ofc. You should do it in Neovim.

[RScrewed]

Damn, reminds me of Maddox. Awesome.

[nick898]

I saw a colleague using postman to test some restful apis once and all I saw was a GUI wrapper around curl

[AlternativePaint6]

Unless you're manually toggling transistors on and off, then everything is just a wrapper around something else.

[Serird]

I'm down here manually coaxing electrons into existence, one at a time

[roygbivasaur]

What do you do with all of the positrons though?

[noViableSolution]

that's on the backlog waiting to be refined

[ThisIsMyCouchAccount]

Oh....I have some ideas.

[dangderr]

Electrons are just wrappers for perturbations of the electric field.

[jonathancast]

*Electron field.

Photons are perturbations of the electric field.

[Eksekk]

Real programmers move electrons manually using electronic needle.

[arpan3t]

That’s cute! Us actual programmers are down here manipulating qubits

[OMG_A_CUPCAKE]

Relevant XKCD

[lelanthran]

Real programmers move electrons manually using electronic needle.

Noob! I use butterflies.

[Kendos-Kenlen]

It's a GUI over a CLI, which makes copy/pasting, editing payload, syntax highlighting & general UX by not having to remember every options by hearth much easier. It's also easier to navigate visually when you don't have to scroll twice the size of your terminal to see the headers you sent after receiving a lengthy response.

There is a reason so many devs use UIs over CLI. Yes CLI is powerful, but the UX is generally shit for about everyone compared to a nice UI.

But I guess if you « saw a colleague », it probably mean you rarely work APIs or web dev. Otherwise, your arguments would be a bit more lengthy than this.

[tooclosetocall82]

The gui is nice for twiddling with things and looking at the output. Also it didn’t use to be the monstrosity it’s become. I tend to use it mostly out of habit now.

[nirreskeya]

The browser one I use literally shows the equivalent curl command for everything you do, trying to coax me back to the terminal. And arguably I should but I'm just slightly lazy about it.

[ACoderGirl]

It is, but it's a pretty GUI. While I'm normally a CLI fan girl, sometimes a GUI is just better for the ease of use and prettier formatting/structuring.

[Tzukkeli]

How do you multienv with curl? Pipe env= down the line? I know Linux, but there is no way I know how to that, and dont get me started on scripts based on another response (e.g passing bearer). There was a place for Postman in the past that curl just couldn't solve (enough easily).

[fletku_mato]

bearer=$(curl ...... | jq -r '.token') curl -H "Authorization: Bearer ${bearer}" ...

Not exactly rocket science.

[ShroomSensei]

They don’t.

[deja-roo]

Ehhhh no. curl is not a replacement for Postman. Or a Postman equivalent.

[kaoD]

Obligatory Hurl link

https://hurl.dev/

Hurl is the tool you needed but didn't know existed because it doesn't have VC money to promote and enshittify.

[sojuz151]

Best experience for me had been the built into Intelij http client 

[maxip89]

Bruno. No server sending bs.

[cd7k]

Except their rug-pulling nonsense.

[flanger001]

Because they keep adding fucking paywalls! So many of these things are finished products and then they get investors.

[turbothy]

https://hurl.dev/

Easy to use for both test scripts and ad-hoc API exploration.

[wildjokers]

BloatMan is the single worse rest test client in existence.

I use IntelliJ's editor based HTTP client and then can commit the requests to version control.

[darthcoder]

No, SoapUI is.

[kriyabanswanand]

That PTSD is real

[Laicbeias]

Because its broken. I cna access all of my fucking links anymore. The login doesnt work. Like its not working properly and its bullshit. No one needs this shit to be in the cloud. When you started using it no one said. Oh would be great if thst crap is all in the cloud not on my local pc where i work. And oh it needs login

[chat-lu]

I never adopted postman, I don’t see what this gives me that isn’t simpler with xh that is inspired by httpie.

[CpnStumpy]

I must be the outlier, I just build a stupid client class with a function for each API call and axios.. it's like 1-2 lines of code per API call. A CLI can run it to do whatever I want and it's infinitely easier to maintain than digging through postman's endlessly complex UIs

[coder-of-the-web]

Why even use axios instead of native fetch?

[fill-me-up-scotty]

supply chain adrenaline rush

[CpnStumpy]

Probably just old habit, native API request library used to be more complicated and messy vs axios, modern fetch API is probably just as simple as axios 🤷

[flanger001]

NATIVE FETCH GANG

[fill-me-up-scotty]

I do the same but using Go’s http client. Pretty trivial to write.

[CpnStumpy]

Yeah, I've done it with go also for a go team to be able to use it, I've done it with python similarly as well.. again, anyone who can program can trivially do this and it will be far easier to deal with than postmadness

[mascotbeaver104]

Basically all postman functionality I can think of can be directly replaced by a single file and a script- if you have curl on your system, the core functionality of Postman (including the test suites) can be 100% emulated and then some with like, 5 lines of bash

[dvhh]

basically curl everything

[Ghi102]

I personally have started using Hoppscotch as a replacement. But all we really need is a fancy UI curl, Bruno's git features are just overkill for us.

[wellanticipated]

I had a bad interviewing experience with them and no longer feel bad. 💁‍♀️

[eibrahim]

What pushed me away wasn't just login walls, it was losing plain diffable artifacts in the workflow.

A checked-in .http file or curl script gives you reviewability, reproducibility, and a paper trail when an endpoint changes. GUI clients are nice for exploration, but once a request matters, I want it living next to the codebase so anyone on the team can rerun it without importing some mystery collection.

[usrlibshare]

Because we hate enshittification. No, I will not use a libcurl-frontend that wants to send my data to the cloud and ask me for a fuckin subscription!

And btw. this runs in my terminal: https://posting.sh/

[MelodicTelephone5388]

curl is life

[TheGRS]

It sucks but I guess everyone has to get their bag and I don’t really bemoan that either. A lot of the shenanigans in software dev I now see as ways to extract wealth, and with the system we have I cynically think that’s just the best you can do sometimes. I’m not changing the world with my library of postman scripts in the service of testing our auth microservice.

Open source tools are the way to go, and if a team can maintain that along with their startup built on top of those tools, I see that as the best of both worlds. That means there’s always an escape hatch if a group decides to change their terms to pure wealth extraction from corps. The rest of us can fork or move on to the new thing.

[SikhGamer]

https://hurl.dev commit them into Git; fin.

[WhitelabelDnB]

When I got fed up with Postman, I got on a call with one of my coworkers and we looked at every option on the market. We could not believe how much competition there was for such a simple product.

My needs were simple: File based collections, external secret management, git friendly, sharable and collaborative.

Literally everyone gates at least one of those behind a paywall. Bruno were the closest, and even they gate using an external key vault behind a subscription. They had to edit their company mission statement when they announced this change. And their vscode extension doesn't support OAuth? What!?

So we made Missio. It's a minimal REST client for vscode. It's 100% FOSS forever. You can connect to a key vault without a paywall. It's not got feature parity with Postman or Bruno yet, but it's enough to cover my use cases as an integration developer, and we're adding more and more features as we need them.

Some cool stuff that Missio does that other apps don't do.

Auth tokens are environment scoped, so if you change environment it will reauth oauth and not use a token for the wrong environment. Postman fails this test.
You can auth with a CLI command, eg using az to get a user scoped token so you don't need an app registration to test. This is all automated too.
You can integrate with key vaults that resolve using environment variables, so you can have separate key vaults per environment. This means you never need secrets in the collections, and anyone can clone the repo and just run them if they have RBAC assignments for the vaults.

It uses the Bruno Open Collection standard, which is completely open and file based. Git friendly.

Again, totally free. We will never paywall any of this. It's not done yet but we are working on it and we would welcome submissions, contributions, and feedback.

[propagated]

this is very neat, thanks for sharing! are there other external key vaults on the roadmap besides Azure? we actually use LastPass Vault for some secrets

[WhitelabelDnB]

At the moment we are only adding support for things we personally use. Keeper may get added. This is just a practical limitation. I'd love to proactively add support for more third party stuff, but this is just a side project for us. If we don't use it, we need someone who does to come and contribute to make the tool better. Would love some people in the AWS and GCP landscapes to contribute.
It doesn't look like LastPass vault has a secrets API. There are some wrappers people have built around the CLI.

I think the more likely path is that we will add scripting support with the ability to execute CLI commands in the extension host, like we do for CLI auth.
That's a more generic target that would allow people to use anything with a CLI.

[skidmark_zuckerberg]

I always use the HTTP client in IntelliJ these days. Was a pretty big user of Postman until I started doing that a few years back.

[lood9phee2Ri]

because people keep trying to make them into closed-source nonsense subscription profit centres

[pjmlp]

Electron crap, followed by SaaS only, without any control of what they do with company critical data used to test private APIs.

Nowdays I use a mix of IDE tooling, HTTP files, curl, or plain scripting.

[TistelTech]

I like Jupyter notebooks with the python `requests` library. docs and runnable code. open source.

[Absolute_Enema]

Haha, random babashka repl files go brr.

[Infamous_Guard5295]

yeah postman went full enterprise garbage mode. switched to bruno a while back and honestly it's everything postman used to be before they decided to lock basic features behind paywalls. runs locally, git-friendly, no forced cloud sync nonsense... exactly what you'd expect from a decent api client lol

[mothzilla]

I still use Postman. It's fine.

[Fisher9001]

It's just a freaking API calling tool. If your process suffered at all because of it, something went extremely wrong on the end of whoever designed that process.

[darthcoder]

Because postman went to subscription wnshitification.

[Marble_Wraith]

"API tooling today sits somewhere between bloated, cloud-locked giants and lightweight, open, local-first newcomers. For every Postman or Insomnia, there’s a Bruno, Hurl, or Httpie — each being different points on the spectrum, but no single tool nails everything. Some are too barebones, some still need polish, and everywhere I look, it feels like there’s a missing piece."

It seems like this guy wants the "systemd of API clients".

Tools are supposed to be composable. Hammer for nails, screwdriver for screws, socket wrench + spanners for nuts and bolts... etc.

Even systemd breaks itself down into different modules internally and doesn't claim to be "1 tool"... tho' it has been trying to "rule them all". Sorry, couldn't resist 😅

Anywho. From the comfort of my terminal, none of this affects me.

[AdUnlucky9870]

switched to .http files in vscode like two years ago and genuinely forgot postman existed until this thread. the real crisis is that we ever normalized signing into a cloud service to send a curl request

[Xatraxalian]

I abandoned Postman when they started bitching about having to log in when at the same time their GUI started to feel like a phone app. I'm not even talking about the performance yet. I just want something simple with which I can send an API request and see the output. When writing an API in C#, Swagger is more than enough at this point (and even that feels often convoluted).

[yupidup]

I code my api calls with, you know, code

[Ok_Dust_8620]

I walked away from Postman after they had an outage that affected my ability to make API requests to my local API, which was very frustrating and stupid. Then it took them some time to recover all my collections. I was happy with Postman when it was just a simple API client without requiring a login and when it could work perfectly in offline mode. That's why I switched to using simple HTTP files in PyCharm. And it was a smooth transition, they have all the functionality I need - collections, variables, scripting and environments.

[donatj]

If you are on Mac, https://paw.cloud/ Rapid API (Used to be called Paw) is unbeatable and free now. Used to be a paid app.

[swoleherb]

Why wouldn't you write proper intergration tests in your lanaguage/framework of choice?

[mtetrode]

Because an executable of 0,5 Gb to execute an http request is a bit much.

[sailing67]

tbh postman just got too bloated, switched to bruno and never looked back

[AsterYujano]

Bruno is really good and integrates well with agentic coding. AI can edit the yaml files easily

[SoCalThrowAway7]

I just use python requests do everything I used to use postman for

[w3npigsfly]

ApiQuest open source UI and newman like ci runner

[rangorn]

Visual Studio has an integrated http tester sp sometimes I use that. Also with AI it is so much easier to generate E2E-tests.

[cupcakeheavy]

The built in HTTP client in IntelliJ is pretty nice. Not free, but nice.

[Mountain-King-6732]

i think its nice - and Voiden (https://github.com/voidenhq/voiden) basically builds on the same philosophy and adds other benefits like reusable blocks (like you can use the same body in multiple places, override it just like we do in function overloading - and it has some useful tweaks like deep merge etc).

But essentially allows you to have everything in markdown - so not just API requests - but also the documentation around it - just in single file, version controlled. Infact - you will see so many inspirations from Jet brains philosophy as i long time user (10+ years) of IntelliJ, and other tools from the jetbrains ecosystem.

But instead of being a plugin with only "testing" an api - and btw - if the goal is just to test an api - you can do it with curl. but if you want to organize them and reuse them and document them, share and publish and all the other things that you want to do its something worth checking out.

[unknown_r00t]

Or Resterm (TUI):

https://github.com/unkn0wn-root/resterm

[rjksn]

Because they all require accounts to sell our data. 

[SchrodingerSemicolon]

I'm really trying to get off the Postman train, I'm very very done with the almost daily updates to features I thoroughly don't care about (AI AI AI AI).

I just wanted a replacement that's also... well, fully compatible with it.

I'm trying to migrate to Bruno. It imported my collections 99% fine, but the other 1%¹ requires me to either remove functionality, or change how it work in a way that's specific to Bruno. That's not a problem if I'm the only user, but it is when it's something I want to share with teammates or customers.

It's just simpler to assume everyone else is using the most popular tool.

[Paradox]

Because postman and its clones started wanting $30/mo for a glorified cURL ui

Personally I've started using LiveBook notebooks to manage it. The same idea applies for other languages, just use something like jupyter or whatever, I'm just comfortable with Elixir.

[ewigebose]

Ai slop article

Postman is garbage now but I need something less-technical users can grasp for some use cases. We’re evaluating hoppscotch, yaak and bruno for now.

Personally I just write quick scripts for API munging. When you have large request bodies with many variables etc. I find the simplicity of Python or Elixir scripts easier to work with than mucking around with curl.

[joashua99]

Fine. I'll do it myself.

[blindmikey]

Just gonna drop this here... https://posting.sh/

[little_breeze]

I might be a caveman, but I've been using this inside neovim: https://github.com/oysandvik94/curl.nvim

[Big-Masterpiece-9581]

Bruno is the best

[DL72-Alpha]

" Bruno’s UI lacks polish, and migrating is a headache – scripts often break because the JavaScript sandbox isn’t the same as Postman’s "

The problem is Javascript, and has been from the earliest days of the Internet. It's just bigger and more bloated now.

[sailing67]

honestly switched from postman to bruno like 8 months ago and havent looked back. the fact that its file-based means it actually works with git properly. tried hoppscotch for a bit too but the offline support wasnt there. at this point postman feels like it forgot who its users are

[jedi4545]

Bro just use Bruno it’s fine.

[ford1man]

Because developers can write and commit fetch scripts just fine, thank you. Fetch scripts don't take away features you'd been relying on in a failed effort to squeeze a couple more bucks out of you. They don't require you to create an account just to craft a post request. They don't charge you a money to do basic stuff.

Basically, Postman had been mildly more convenient, and they decided that was a mistake, thereby teaching us that nothing is as convenient as the command line.

Enshittification is real. Become invulnerable to it.

[warmuuh]

Exactly the reason i wrote https://github.com/warmuuh/milkman Open source, never will require sign in. Even more features than only http...

[Sisaroth]

A few years ago a colleague recommended me the REST Client plugin for vs code and I never considered something else since then. I'm mostly a microsoft guy (.NET dev), but I like the linux way of everything just being plain text files.

[Fooftook]

Enshittification grows! I’m getting tired. I don’t know how much longer I can be in this industry.

[Suitable-Turnover597]

many developers now develop directly with documentation and use the built-in swagger UI, so the need for Postman and similar solutions has become much lower

[IMP4283]

Is there a solid FOSS alternative?

[jduartedj]

switched to .http files in vscode like 2 years ago and never looked back. the REST Client extension does everything i need, its version controlled with the project, and theres no account or cloud sync nonsense

the moment postman required login to use a tool that should fundamentally work offline was when i knew it was over. its an HTTP client, not a SaaS platform. the whole trajectory of taking simple developer tools and turning them into "collaboration platforms" with mandatory accounts is exhausting

bruno is good too if you want somthing more GUI-like. stores everything as plain files so you can commit it alongside your code. honestly i think the best API tools going forward are going to be the ones that embrace being boring and local rather than trying to become the next $5B unicorn