this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023

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168

What happened to Postman?! (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

48 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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:

top 42 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 78 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

At least it's open-source, so it's hard for them to destroy the product completely.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah works amazingly well on Linux too

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This one. It's nothing at all like Postman, and that's a good thing.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

check out this topic here: https://programming.dev/post/435823 where I asked question about postman alternatives not so long ago. Tons of suggestions!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

well, cause that’s where the most money comes from I guess

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Thunderclient

Looks great, thanks for the rec.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I’ve never heard of Thunder Client but it looks really interesting

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Seems investors are to blame...

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's stupid money for an api testing tool lmao

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Valued at 5.6 billion dollars. Investors are fucking idiots.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

And that's putting it lightly

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A tale as old as tech

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm very very surprised nobody has recommended hoppscotch.io yet

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Hmm cloud-based solutions for this scare me. But ok if open source.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I could be wrong but I don't think hoppscotch.io is cloud based. CMIIW

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I do like that, thanks for sharing. I'll check ot out.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://insomnia.rest/ I've been using insomnia and it's been pretty great for the most part.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

This looks really nice. Thanks for posting it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you use vscode, you might look at the thunderclient extension.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Oh this looks promising! Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You probably want this now https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.rest-client

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

+1, has dot env file support so you can commit your rest experiments to your repo without worrying about exposing auth secrets

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the suggestion I'll try it out!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

time to switch to insomnia my friend!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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

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