Are you familiar with API testing? If not then I will give you a concept before going to compare between these 2 API testing tools!
According to Wikipidia:
API testing is a type of software testing that includes direct testing of application programming interfaces (APIs) and is part of integration testing to determine if they meet the functional and reliability expectations. reliability, performance and security.
API terminal testing is one of the most important steps in the development process. Without testing the API, you may not know if it is correct or not, it may be because the required parameter is wrong, lack access or a bunch of other things are not connected, your application is not working. If your application is not working, customers cannot use it. That directly affects your team and you, you will be asked by the boss, the team will have to report …
Those are the reasons we have API testing tools. These tools help us, as an application developer, to check if we transfer a specific set of data (or not) to our application and it will give us feedback. expected results. It is a simple idea, but it makes us (and the development life cycle) so much easier.
Note: This is not an article about using Postman or Insomnia. This is an article to compare the two features that the two tools provide, helping you make better decisions about the use to suit your needs during development or testing.
Benefits of API testing tools
Some common benefits when using API testing tools:
Set up and test terminals faster (you don’t need to go through the entire business flow to set up data and then execute commands to change data) Interact with fewer statements There are many ways Set permissions depending on the type of format used for the code being sent and received. Better performance and reliability testing.
Common point of both test tools
Both Insomnia and Postman tools are extremely useful sharing tools for developers in front-end, back-end and full-stack groups.
The outstanding advantages of 2 tools:
- Is a free software version for users (can upgrade to a paid version will have more features at any time)
- Is open source software
- Allow more working space (development, acceptance, prod, …)
- Local and environment variables are likely to be updated on request to the endpoint (sometimes the request string).
- Allows imports and exports test data to easily share them with team members
- Ability to save call commands and organize them into foldes or collections
- GraphQL integration and testing options
- There are many ways to configure permissions (OAuth, bearer tokens, Basic, HAWK, etc.) and generate / manage cookies
- Both applications have a dark and light color scheme (this is not a big deal, but it creates a good effect and impresses me)
These are features that both applications have. Through the process of working and using the Free version, I felt no need to upgrade to the paid version. That alone meets all my requirements 
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And now will be a special point of the two tools
Private point only Postman has
Postman comes with a suite of products and features that are much more efficient when actually digging into its documentation. There are a number of things that make Postman different from other API testing tools:
- API documentation (Postman will create and store browser-based API documents in real time)
- Collection runs (Run a group of requests as a sequence with the corresponding environment – this is extremely useful for automated testing)
- Keep track of where Postman periodically runs the data to check its performance and feedback
- Test scripts written in Javascript will verify the response object and the time from the endpoint
- And mock servers for teams to simulate each endpoint and its corresponding response in a Postman Collection. Developers can view potential responses, without spinning up a back end, and team members can be aligned on expectations during the forth phases of API development.
- The server emulates teams to simulate each endpoint and respond accordingly in Postman Collection. Developers can view potential responses without the need for Back-Ends, and team members can be streamlined during the earliest API development stages.
Private point only Insomnia has
Insomnia has some special features that Postman does not offer such as:
- Template tags (similar to environment variables but they perform operations on strings, timestamps, …)
- Ability to create new plugins for Insomnia for its user community.
- Assigning a Client certificate to the workspace and authenticating SSL (or disabling it)
- The code generator consists of 12 different languages (very handy if you want the command-line CURL or put it into the actual code base)
- The document area is very descriptive, things like instructions, code snippets and even test data can be added to a specific call or data store.
- See feedback in JSON and XML (with Insomnia you can see HTML pages, images, SVG, audio files and even pdf documents
Conclude
In general, it can be said that Postman became the leading application of API testing tool. It is quite complete and more fully functional than Insomnia, bringing many really great benefits to developers even when using only the free version.
For my teams, who practice fully automated CI / CD testing and deployments, having a test collection runner like Postman offers is a big selling point, and if you’re fully dedicated to supporting an API, having generated, real-time documentation could also be a very nice to have.
For the project team who use CI / CD development and testing completely automatically, there is a powerful API testing tool like Postman that is a great benefit, creating real-time documentation is also very handy. and helpful.
If you say that if Insomnia combines with some of Postman’s features as it continues to evolve and improve, there’s no reason it can’t continue to be a very strong competitor in the world of API testing.
Thank you for reading this article, hope that it is helpful and help you better understand your choice in API testing work.
Source of translation: https://itnext.io/postman-vs-insomnia-comparing-the-api-testing-tools-4f12099275c1