I stopped using Postman when it magically started connecting to a central server for… nothing useful, really. I have no idea why people would design software this way, especially a development tool that should work with any web server, under any network condition (including fully offline against localhost).

Now I just have a Makefile with a bunch of curl invocations, or Python tests with requests to match against expected responses.

Ah, yes, the cloud-dependent tool that forces you to pay per seat and log in for any type of collaboration is down when their cloud provider is.

Anyways, the folks have spoken, no need to double down. There are more than a dozen alternatives to it, and new ones are coming up.

I'm helping build a new one.

- Completely offline.

- Gives the ability to build reusable blocks (headers, query params, etc)

- Let's you document everything in Markdown.

- Imports your collections and cURLs.

https://voiden.md/

Surprised to see no one's mentioned HTTPie yet. I reach out for their web app anytime I have to make a one off network request: https://httpie.io/app

This could have been a 10 Megabyte TUI app in your terminal tab. Boggles my mind how even this kind of app manages to bring in Electron and the cloud.

Edit: Ah, so here it is: https://posting.sh

RubyMine, and I assume its cousin JetBrains IDEs, has a great HTTP client (Tools -> HTTP Client) that I've used when I need this sort of functionality. I've been off of Postman for quite some time, since it got so complicated, and all I wanted was something to help me make simple web requests. (No disrespect intended to those who like Postman, it's just too overwhelming for my needs.)

Question: Do I miss something by not using Postman? My alternatives for development are "Edit and Resend" of a request (in Firefox) and plain old curl scripts for reusable examples.

I highly recommend checking out the postman forum for posts about the scratchpad being removed, it's a fascinating and frustrating read.

It would be so much faster and easier for the postman reps to just shut down the conversation. And yet, for some reason, they keep it going for very long while still being extremely evasive when it comes to any concern raised about data sovereignty.

Depending on your usage, you may not need a separate app. Jetbrains[0], Visual Studio[1] and VSCode[2] have support for http files.

[0]: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/http-client-in-product-c...

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/test/http-file...

[2]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re...

This is exactly why I made Yaak [1]. It's fully offline, no telemetry, open source, and can even sync with Git.

https://yaak.app

I think for the most part everyone has accepted that Postman grew into a monster that bloated with features and presumably that comes with online dependence.

For a long time I used Paw, which became RapidAPI a couple years ago. Nice little app that does it's job well.

Lately I've just been using a Phoenix LiveBook notebook, with the Req package loaded into it. I can make requests, do arbitrary transforms on the data, and generally stay right at home in a language I like and understand

If you don't know elixir, I'm sure jupyter or some other notebook system would do just as nice of a job

If you're willing to use a CLI, you can try Hurl [1]. It's is an Open Source cli using libcurl to run and test HTTP requests with plain text. We use libcurl for the reliability, quickness and top features (HTTP/3 IPv6 for instance) and there are features like:

- requests chaining,

- capturing and passing data from a response to another request,

- response tests (JSONPath, XPath, SSL certs, redirects etc...)

There is nice syntax sugar for requesting REST/SOAP/GraphQL APIs but, at the core, it's just libcurl! You can export you files to curl commands for instance. (I'm one of the maintainers)

[1]: https://hurl.dev

I made a very simple lightweight yaml based Postman alternative called `yapi`.

https://github.com/jamierpond/yapi

Run this:

  yapi -c ./users.yapi.yaml
  

  # users.yapi.yaml
  # yaml-language-server: $schema=https://pond.audio/yapi/schema
  url: http://localhost:3000
  method: GET
  path: /api/users
  query:
    select[name]: true
    select[tag]: true
    limit: 10

https://www.usebruno.com/

Posting (https://posting.sh/) is a pretty cool alternative I’ve used in the past. There’s no reason I can see why I would use a SaaS product for this.

Apparently Postman needs to be online in order to send “telemetry”: https://anonymousdata.medium.com/postman-is-logging-all-your...

Bruno + git has been perfect for our team. Collections in the repo, no external dependencies, works offline. Should have switched years ago.

It isn't working locally for quite some time now, hence why many companies have forbidden using Postman, given the issue of testing internal APIs with security information hosted on Postman servers.

I remember when one of the "Core Goals" of Postman was "Complete control over your data - Keep simple JSON based data formats which can be exported and shared as per user needs".

https://web.archive.org/web/20140604204111/http://www.getpos...

If you're on macOS, try Paw/RapidAPI https://paw.cloud They may be affected by AWS.

Stopped using postman from about 2018 I think. I think it was because I found it stupid to have to log-in to do API queries.

I didn't even find it that ergonomic to use, to be fair.

We have moved all our stuff to Bruno nowadays.

This is one of many reasons why I prefer curl[0] and a bit of shell scripting. With this approach there is no dependency on a vendor's servers.

0 - https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html

I'm looking at alternatives that are guarantee to work locally and only found the following:

Posting.sh -> Postman imports are experimental which makes it a non-starter for people like myself with large Postman collections. TUI only also makes it harder to switch.

Insomnia -> Owned by another large tech company.

Yaak -> Made by the same guy who created AND SOLD Insomnia above. Not exactly comforting to switch over for. How long till this one also gets sold?

Any other great local tools out there? I would like to be done with Postman.

I moved from Postman to RapidAPI when Postman tried to get me to sign up for their cloud service just migrate my data to a new laptop.

I'm using an old version of Postman with their servers blocked through the system hosts file. I keep meaning to migrate to whatever the next best thing is but this setup just works for me.

OK which dumb engineer unsafely wrapped the entire feature flagging / observability / telemetry tooling around the main process of the app such that it wouldn't load unless those libraries resolved?

The red flag appeared a few years ago already. My company forbade us to use it. This wan no problem for me, because I mostly use curl, but people got upset. We thought this too much restrictive, but ...

I feel bad for the engineering team that has to implement it all this way. Hang in there folks.

I ditched Postman for Insomnia (Open source) after Postman refused to adhere to customers to disable auto-updates for 6 years+. I checked on their GitHub issue tracker and it turns out, the solution was to upgrade to their "Enterprise plan".

https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/69...

So, I said fuck it and switched to a real, open source alternative, Insomnia, instead:

https://insomnia.rest

I migrated to insomnia.rest when postman required logging in for basic functionality.

This makes me feel more justified in using Posting in my terminal these days.

Yeah I was pretty damn mad when I opened postman and it was completely unusable. Can safely say I'm done with it now.

It connects to their servers when it starts up; have to assume their server is down. It used to be so much nicer before they added this "feature".

Bruno is quite good with postman compatibility and it's own syntax

Stop using Postman and its ilk. Use .http files.

Someone should make a better one called Getman.

lately I really enjoyed using http files for sharing http example requests

Hello all,

Postman founder here. I did not time this with an AWS outage of this magnitude but I posted about filesystem, git, and offline support coming to Postman last week: https://x.com/a85/status/1978979495836356819?s=46

Postman has a lot of capabilities now that require the cloud but there is still an offline client built in just for requests.

Building sign-in and cloud features were not due to a VC-led conspiracy. A large number of companies depend on APIs (like AWS) and have thousands of services and APIs. Customers need to manage them and wanted us to build it.

maybe it doesn't do everything postman does, but I'm very happy using the rest client extension in vs code, the http files with the api calls are commited to the source code repository along with the code is easy to use, does what i need, and is easy to share with my colleagues.

How many other offline and online things failed unexpectedly due to the aws outage?

Thats why I self host Yaade https://docs.yaade.io (shameless plug lol)

Postman is absolutely shit since it was sold. Stop using it.

I will phase out this tool, definely

just use curl

restfox for the win

In the beginning, there was Postman, and we used it, and it was good. Then, Postman became enshittified, so we switched to Insomnia. Then, Insomnia became enshittified, so we switched to Bruno. Then, Bruno became enshittified, so now it's Yaak.

Let's see how long it takes for one of these programs to break the cycle.

But why does the app stop working if telemetry can't be sent? Who engineered this?

Happy with https://yaak.app/so far

Mine used to be all local too, but then it required me to login online in order to work.

But mine is still working locally now. If it stops working locally, what even is the point anymore?

I am against government regulation, but at times likes this (or your sous vide and washing machine requiring online accounts to function) the idea for regulations that mandate availability of local server for client server applications is alluring. And making all cloud functionality optional.

Umm, just wondering why you never unplugged it from the internet for a few days(or forever)?

I switched to Insomnia, seems not as bloated for my use-case.

just use bruno+git https://www.usebruno.com/

Just use cURL.

It will never disappear, enshittify, or let you down. It's already modern, and has a great UI. It's available everywhere. It supports every protocol and feature under the sun. Those fancy features you think you need: you don't. Whatever you're missing can be easily added via simple shell scripts or aliases.

Yeah they really turned their product into over-complicated garbage instead of focusing on doing one thing well.

Off-Topic: I read about yaak app as an alternative to Postman - can anyone recommend an alternative to Stoplight Studio for covering "the other side" by any means?

I loved to use their free desktop app for building API documentations which can be used for scaffolding / generating APIs but for some reason I don't remember right now I had to stop using it.