1y ago

What happened to Postman?!

Just recently fired Postman back up and it's so different now. Finding it difficult to find my way around when all I want to do is just send a request.

I haven't used it as much in the last 3 years just because I've mostly been building APIs that expose a Swagger UI, but I definitely remember the UI being much simpler back then.

Have y'all moved on to different solutions? If so which ones are you using?

EDIT

I've been going through the suggestions, here's the list of suggestions in order of most times suggested or number of points on the comment:

48 comments

Insomnia is a bit more like classic postman, though it's kinda heading the same way too.
Ended up falling back to cURL and shell history for REST stuffs a lot of the time.
- I think I remember insomnia being a pretty popular alternative when I first picked up Postman. Never gave it a chance but maybe now it's the time to switch.
- At least it's open-source, so it's hard for them to destroy the product completely.
- Yeah works amazingly well on Linux too

Enshittification.
I just switched to https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.rest-client a few years ago. Way better, simpler, easily version controlled and reviewed, completely FOSS. Only downside is it's just for VSCode, if that's not your thing
- This one. It's nothing at all like Postman, and that's a good thing.

check out this topic here: https://programming.dev/post/435823 where I asked question about postman alternatives not so long ago. Tons of suggestions!
- Perfect! There's definitely a lot of good suggestions there.
  I'm just so disappointed to see Postman trying to become a more "enterprise" solution.
  
  well, cause that’s where the most money comes from I guess

We made the decision yesterday to dump Postman in favor of Thunder Client. As soon as I saw the push to create an account and use cloud workspaces, I knew the time would come.
(edit: correct styling of Thunder Client)
- Thunderclient
  Looks great, thanks for the rec.
- I’ve never heard of Thunder Client but it looks really interesting

Seems investors are to blame...
- That's stupid money for an api testing tool lmao
  
  Valued at 5.6 billion dollars. Investors are fucking idiots.
- A tale as old as tech

+1 for this question. Postman was a thing of simple beauty before they tried chasing the VC money

I'm very very surprised nobody has recommended hoppscotch.io yet
- Hmm cloud-based solutions for this scare me. But ok if open source.
  
  I could be wrong but I don't think hoppscotch.io is cloud based. CMIIW
- Hoppscotch is such an amazing project. It’s open source, selfhostable, a PWA, and does pretty much everything I used Postman for. easily best alternative for me
- I do like that, thanks for sharing. I'll check ot out.

https://insomnia.rest/ I've been using insomnia and it's been pretty great for the most part.
- This seems to be one of the most popular alternatives now.
  I never gave it a chance but maybe now's the time to switch.

Stopped using it when they started sending me emails every fucking day.
I'LL LET YOU KNOW WHEN I WANT TO TEST AN API THANKS
- This so much. Nothing worse than when a niche service emails you or push notifications you to use something you only need to use when you have a very specific need to haha.

Insomnia has that classic postman feel, but personally I switched to hurl ( https://hurl.dev/ ) I really like how simple it is once it's setup.
- This looks really nice. Thanks for posting it.

This kind of thing led me to disabling feature updates on my older Postman installs, and switching to Insomnia as a replacement on systems that don't have Postman
https://insomnia.rest (GitHub)
- It has a similar look to the classic postman. I'm just hoping they don't go the same way postman did if they end up with big investors and ridiculous valuations.

If you use vscode, you might look at the thunderclient extension.
- Oh this looks promising! Thanks!

You probably want this now https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.rest-client
- +1, has dot env file support so you can commit your rest experiments to your repo without worrying about exposing auth secrets
- Thanks for the suggestion I'll try it out!

time to switch to insomnia my friend!

Yep started using https://hoppscotch.io it's basically a clone

I've always used and will continue to always use curl.

Ive been using something called Insomnia lately. It's a bit less fully-featured when it comes to things like env vars, but I love that I can copy any call from my browser's network tab as a curl command and just paste it right into insomnia

I tried postman and came to the same conclusion as you. I couldn't figure it out at all. I downloaded an app for android called "ApI Tester". I might try out ThunderClient, which others have suggested, if it works on Linux.

I’ve been using RapidAPI on my Mac. It looks quite nice, but I’ve found some parts to be a little buggy.

48 comments