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Postman

Score8.8 out of 10

399 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Postman?

Postman, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their flagship API development and management free to small teams and independent developers. Higher tiers (Postman Pro and Postman Enterprise) support API management, as well as team collaboration, extended support and other advanced features.

Categories & Use Cases

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API design - You can design your API specifications in Postman using OpenAPI, RAML, GraphQL, or SOAP formats. Postman’s schema editor makes it easy to work with specification files of any size, & it validates specifications with a built-in linting engine.
API documentation - Postman automatically generates documentation & supports markdown-enabled and machine-readable documentation. Docs automatically include request details & sample code. Share the docs with your team, in a public workspace, or in a dedicated portal.
API testing - Build and run functional, integration, & regression tests directly in Postman or as part of your CI/CD pipeline with Newman (Postman’s a command-line Collection Runner that enables you to run & test a collection from the command line).
Public workspaces - Public workspaces allow you to share your APIs publicly with anyone. You can use public workspaces to gather feedback on your APIs, onboard developers quickly, or just showcase your work.
Reporting - Postman generates reports that enable you to visualize data for team metrics and usage, & for API activities such as creation, collection execution, and test runs. Use reports to get insights on performance, troubleshooting, & SLA adherence.

1 / 5

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Postman has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 399 ratings of Postman's features
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Top Performing Features

  • API user onboarding

    Systems to allow users to sign up, receive access credentials and be assigned usage rights

    Category average: 8.3

  • API usage data

    Analysis of traffic patterns to track how API is being used

    Category average: 8.3

  • API access control

    Authentication and authorization systems to ensure that users of the API have permission

    Category average: 8.3

Areas for Improvement

  • Rate limits and usage policies

    Usage quotas to restrict traffic volumes to keep traffic loads manageable

    Category average: 7.8

  • API monitoring and logging

    Regular test cycles to check that APIs are operating as expected and log analysis providing deeper analysis on system usage

    Category average: 8.1

  • API versioning

    There are mechanisms to roll out new versions of the API and the ability to migrate applications to new versions.

    Category average: 8.2

Reviews

What users are saying about Postman.
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Postman API tester

Verified User
Engineer in Research & Development (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Postman is API testing tool which generates the request (like http) which hits the backend server and get the data from the database. Its a kind of checker between backend and frontend. As, i am in research department which aim to innovate more advanced technology and increasing functionality and reliability.

Pros

  • Debugging is easy to find and handle.
  • Data validation
  • Authorization checking
  • Automated monitoring

Cons

  • performnce slows down in large collections
  • security
  • Needs an improvement for advanced APIs

Return on Investment

  • Its free to use
  • Huge user support across platforms
  • friendly interface

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Apache JMeter

Other Software Used

Eclipse, Canva, MySQL

Quick and interactive way to get set up with APIs

Incentivized
Callum O'ConnorView profile
Senior Analytics Engineer in Corporate at Adaptavist (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Postman helps us not only use APIs, but to save setups, workspaces, preferences, etc. This means we can adopt 'personas' when interacting with an API to test various use cases where certain permissions or roles are being used. Being able to share these workspaces and templates means people can publish and pull a standard setup for each type of API we work with.

Pros

  • Postman allows you to create unique workspaces = This means you can have one workspace for one vendor (E.g. GoogleMaps, Atlassian Marketplace etc.) or you can set up your workspace to be agnostic of vendor and instead use it as a 'persona' E.g. a local terminal, a service account on Airflow etc.
  • Sharing setups - Being able to share workspaces, settings, credentials, API calls and more means we can set up templates and distribute them to developers easily. It also means vendors can provide Postman templates to help get its users started.
  • Showing the API code that's generated - Postman is good at bringing a UI to what is essentially a terminal or code based set of instructions. Though this can mask what's actually going on behind the hood, there's an option to see what's actually being generated and cURL'd.
  • Visualise AI - Visualising the response of an API can be hard at times, however the integrated AI feature can help display the response in a table or graph. The table feature is particularly helpful for looking at non structured data in a structured way.

Cons

  • Postman can hide too much - Though the UI makes it easier to interact with APIs, it can sometimes what's happening behind the scenes. You can see what its' cURL'ing in some cases. But for some setups this isn't always enough.
  • Varying levels of settings and parameters - Postman is very customisable in terms of setting the scope of variables and credentials. This is very powerful, but can ultimately make it quite hard to see everything you need in one place. There are some times where a credential is being used or a variable is being grabbed from somewhere and I have no idea where it's coming from.
  • Postman nomenclature - Due to its complexity and customisability Postman uses a lot of its own nomenclature and naming conventions. Workspaces, environments, collections etc. It can be a bit overwhelming at the start and navigating the different layers with the new names to understand can mean getting set up can be slow.

Return on Investment

  • Easy onboarding to APIs - Getting setup with new APis is quicker with Postman once you've set up your environment/workspace. it doesn't take too much time to set things up, test your connection and review responses. This allowed newcomers to get setup and using new APIs within an hour of onboarding.
  • Sharing of API's and early access - When working with a vendor around some development work, they were able to share with me their Postman workspace file allowing me to explore all of their new methods and review documentation all within Postman. This made it very easy to explore the new API. This early access API unblocked several key objectives for my team and within a few days we were already building solutions and testing them with Postman.
  • Less exposure of secrets in repo commits - Being able to store and fetch your secrets in Postman has meant that we've not seen a single secret/token exposure by accidental commit to a remote repo.

Usability

Other Software Used

HashiCorp Terraform, Snowflake, dbt, Matillion, AWS IAM Identity Center, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Amazon QuickSight, Apache Airflow, Looker, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Atlassian Confluence, Bitbucket, Gitpod, GitHub, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Slack, TablePlus, Sourcetree

Postman - Complete tool for API testing.

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our current business in my organization, we are moving from a legacy system to a new system with the latest cloud technology, and since everything is new, we are testing from scratch. Here, postman plays an important role in API testing. Managing collection through Postman is so easy that it makes testing comfortable.

Pros

  • API Testing and Debugging.
  • Environment management.
  • Variable management.
  • Automated Testing with Collections and Test Script.

Cons

  • I feel that good version control is missing.

Return on Investment

  • Enhanced Productivity in shift left environment.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Swagger Open Source and supported by SmartBear

Other Software Used

BrowserStack, Appium

One in a million Tool

Incentivized
Verified User
Executive in Customer Service (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Postman is really great and one of a kind tool for all our API's. We have all the API's there and working with it is really great.

Pros

  • API Testing
  • API Debugging

Cons

  • More API Calls

Return on Investment

  • Flxibility to work

Usability

all in one tool AKA Swiss army knife of API world

Lankit PatelView profile
AWS Developer | Laravel Developer in Information Technology at AeonX Digital Solutions (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The regular use case Postman is fine as it's helpful to manage multiple APIs belonging to various projects. but for our case, Postman is a big relief, especially because we often have to communicate with non-conventional clients who have their own custom API-consuming mechanisms. i.e SAP service; those guys do not possess familiarity with convention REST APIs. this is where Postman proved to be a big help. all we needed from our side was just give a link and they'll get the whole API collection.

Pros

  • bundling of APIs into collection
  • allow to create a globally accessible link
  • great UI/UX to interact with APIs

Cons

  • desktop version is process heavy
  • same is the case with extention
  • it would be better if they produce a slim minimal version with only essentials packed in

Most Important Features

  • generate link for sharing to others
  • authorization to limit rights in organization
  • flexibility to have App or extention

Return on Investment

  • certainly free version is pocket frinedly
  • pro version is better to work with organizations and for the charges, it really deliveres above average
  • unseen ROI is also received in the form of increased productivity

Alternatives Considered

Amazon API Gateway, MuleSoft Anypoint Platform and Boomi

Other Software Used

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, Amazon API Gateway, Boomi

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