Now I just have a Makefile with a bunch of curl invocations, or Python tests with requests to match against expected responses.
Also I am not counting that Insomina won't follow the same footsteps as Postman.
There are several FOSS command line tools that can do this easier, e.g. https://httpie.io/cli
But the UX is just terrible (for me) or at least has been every time I've tried to start using it more.
I mean, come on, the most basic use of creating a request goes like this:
1. Sorry, can't let you create a request before you create a collection.
2. Sorry, can't let you create a collection before you make a decision on in which path you will be storing all your collections.
3. Sorry, can't let you create a request before you think of a good name for it.
etc.
Like what the heck? This should be just one click to create a new untitled request then fill in the URL and send.
At first I thought this might be growing pains since it was new but every year I try it and it hasn't improved.
it might have changed now but it did not support grpc endpoints, which was a dealbreaker for me. but definitely appreciate the project and i hope it reaches core feature parity soon.
Connecting to a license server is pretty much standard.
For Postman it is annoying because it was never explicitly stated and it seemed like they are cool kids making nice helpful app. But really they are in for money. Which is not bad have to say but the way they did it is bad.
I get the whining, but teams need ways to share their complex workflows, and teams are where the money is for all dev focused software.
That's who pays for all your tools to have free versions.
People who use make and curl to jury rig some unshareable solution together that no-one else in their company would even bother trying to use aren't worth any money to companies.
Teams that are knowledgeable jury rig their own custom solutions without all the enterprise cruft. They make solutions that fix their problem and they do it faster than the teams who use bloated enterprise solutions.
I am tired of seeing over engineered enterprise solutions that that are implemented and never used because they can’t be integrated into the dev workflow easily. Simple bash script that does the task it was designed to do beats any enterprise crap.
???
Mash 'em, boil 'em, put 'em in git, next to your code?
Complacent corporate teams. Agile teams need to simplify their workflows, and know that a Makefile can be better than some closed down, Cloud-first tool.
>That's who pays for all your tools to have free versions
Nah, we have free versions for stuff without enterprise editions too.
>People who use make and curl to jury rig some unshareable solution together that no-one else in their company would even bother trying
It's that "no-one else" that doesn't bring value.
Apps like Postman are the wrong tool for this purpose.
If you want to share workflows, let alone complex workflows, any automated test suite is far better suited for this purpose.
We are in the age of LLMs and coding agents, which make BDD-style test frameworks even more relevant, as they allow developers to implement the workflows, verify they work, and leave behind an enforceable and verifiable human-readable description of those workflows.
Git is pretty good at sharing you know
Edit: Ah, so here it is: https://posting.sh
Wow, in a world dominated by gigabytes of electron application, people thinks 10 MB is the optimal size for a simple utility TUI app.
As a reference, (from archlinux repo), vim’s install package is 2.3MB, curl is 1.2MB, lua (the complete language interpreter) is 362KB
Take the Micro editor. It's written in Go, and packs a fair bit of functionality into a single 12 meg static binary (of which a few megs is probably the runtime.)
Probably because it began as an chrome addon before it was "standalone".
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.
The CEO committed to open-sourcing it, as well as to not monetize on anything that doesn't introduce operational costs to the team.
What you're saying doesn’t sound familiar whatsoever, but I'd really like to look more into it.
* The text is tiny for my old eyes. I figured there's probably a setting for it and hit Cmd-, and found there's no settings UI whatsoever. No keyboard shortcut either it seems, and no help menu either, so no searching for "keyboard" with Shift-Cmd-/
* .void files may be markdown, but no markdown editor will recognize it as such. Maybe support .void.md as well. I also couldn't find any way to edit the markdown source of a .void file from voiden, which is a bit ironic for a tool that loudly advertises the markdown format as a central feature.
* Could there be a block that expands into the full URL of the request and parameters above it (or perhaps as args)? How about another that renders as a cURL command, which would cover POST/PUT/PATCH requests nicely too. My API documentation always has cURL request examples and I detest writing them by hand.
* While I'm suggesting blocks, one that renders the response headers/body to the preceding request would also be handy. It should support a placeholder response that gets replaced when the request is actually run (and perhaps a "save" button to persist it in the markdown). Responses get long, so maybe have a max-height for the block and make it scrollable
I'm actually really excited about Voiden and hope these can be addressed. It has a similar feel to Jetbrains' .http format, but an evolutionary leap beyond it. It also feels really raw and unfinished.
[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...
Thus, we stick with hurl.
QA seems to stick to robot framework instead. Some use Bruno.
Converted a bunch stuff just laying in my shell history into actual actionable files finally :D
It's great. You can even paste a curl command into it and it will automatically convert and format it. You can then use the Copy button to convert your changes back to curl.
It used to considered vile that drug dealers tried to hook their users and force dependence... turns out that they were just ahead of the curve.
It brought to mind this quote:
“It’s only software developers and drug dealers who call people users,”
From a recent article that came through the feed:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/18/are-we-li...
I hate it, for myself I don’t use it but when having to share API stuff I have to use it because that’s what other people understand.
Good for postman business, bad for everyone.
Sincere question, been studying lots of OSS commercial licensing and always wonder what works in which context
Yes, it's a good-faith license. The license doesn't even apply to the OSS version (only prebuilt binaries).
The bet is that super fans will pay for it in the early days and, as it gets adopted by larger companies, they will pay in order to comply with the legalities of commercial use. So far, it's working! The largest company so far is 34 seats, with a couple more in the pipe!
how would someone use this in a project that operates within VS Code Remote where the source sits on a remote server and isn't physically on the file system.
I'm not quite sure why Yaak wouldn't work in this case. It it because your running server wouldn't be accessible to Yaak, running on your system?
I haven't used postman or insomnia in a while since they went to the cloud, so I could just be missing it, but that's also a non-starter for me.
> Having created and sold Insomnia in 2019
I didn't know you created Yaak!
I just downloaded Yaak and it's been awesome, thank you!
I downloaded this through AUR on Arch and one bit of feedback is that I wish you'd make the sig verification a whole bunch easier, thanks!
Can you provide clarity on is a commercial license is needed. The license appears to be MIT but the yaak.app website gives the impression a license is required, even stating as such in FAQ.
Thanks!
And yes, you can indeed run the OSS yourself for commercial purposes.
Edit: oh my, you also made Insomnia, that I used when Postman was on the enshittification path...
One idea: since you are doing good-faith licenses anyway, maybe you could add in the possibility to pay for some kind of one-time license? I don't particularly need or want updates from my API tool, I just want it to work and not break. I would be fine with paying a one time commercial license that gives non expiring right to use a particular version.
These api clients are rocket science, the barrier for entry is very low.
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
Each one has its strengths, and weaknesses, Insomnia can export the saved requests as `curl` commands so it's a nice visualisation to iterate over a complex call until it's working, and then be exported if needed to be automated; `curl` is quite ubiquitous but clunky to remember the exact arguments I might need; HTTPie has a nice argument syntax so it's quite readable to be quickly edited but isn't present without installing Python, pip, and pulling it.
I guess a substitution would be a git repo with curl scripts and environment variables?
We also have some non-tech people who use postman to run tests.
Yep, and works well for us.
But to your question - I have saved based authenticated request to our company useful APIs - github/jira/artifactory - so when I want to string together some micro tool to do something in batch, I don't have to remember where do I create API key, and how do they accept it.
At the end of the day with Postman you wind up trying to codify requests via collections, which tends to just be programming in a more limited language.
Other then that, its same old curl.
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
But, why such low stats on github?! I guess everyone is jamming on postman, eh?
- 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
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.
Also, TIL that these are not IntelliJ-specific (that’s where I use them)
https://web.archive.org/web/20140604204111/http://www.getpos...
I didn't even find it that ergonomic to use, to be fair.
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.
« Offline only - We take security and privacy seriously. Bruno is an offline tool and there is no syncing of your data to any cloud »
Disclaimer: I maintain it.
#!/bin/bash -x
TOK="my-jwt-tok"
case "$1" in
get-foo)
curl -H "header: bearer $TOK" "http://www.example.com/foo" | jq .
;;
post-bar)
curl \
-H "header: bearer $TOK" "http://www.example.com/bar" \
-H "content-type: application/json" \
--data-raw '{"baz":"bap"}'
;;
*)
;;
esac
./example.bash get-foo
Kreya is privacy-first since its first commit five years ago, since we were fed up with Postman and Insomnia. Happy to answer any questions
Fully local and no hidden proxy. https://github.com/chapar-rest/chapar
https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/69...
So, I said fuck it and switched to a real, open source alternative, Insomnia, instead:
That being said, it would be awesome to have something inside Yaak where I could test API endpoints, like integration tests for APIs.
For recreational internet use, I use yy025 + TCP client + TLS proxy. No fees, no telemetry, no BS. I can select from a long list of TCP clients in this setup, e.g., original netcat, tcploop, tcpclient, socat, etc., as well as a variety of TLS proxies, e.g., tinyproxy+stunnel, haproxy, etc. I can modify the source of all the programs and can do more than is possible if using an "HTTP client", e.g., curl
Of course I am not testing "web apps" for a commercial enterprise. Nor do I use a so-called "modern", graphical browser. I retrieve data without a browser. Since I use HTTP every day in textmode it is "interesting"^1 to see software that somehow commercialises similar HTTP use, e.g., Postman, Burp, etc.
1. For example, https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/postman-valuation-2-bill...
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.
They started hardening our images and curl went poof.
But mine is still working locally now. If it stops working locally, what even is the point anymore?
Let's see how long it takes for one of these programs to break the cycle.
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.
https://anonymousdata.medium.com/postman-is-logging-all-your...
There are SO many alternatives. It’s curl UI wrapper with secrets* management! Why do we all need enterprise licenses??
*and the secrets were all exposed in logs!!
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.