Postman

The industry-standard API platform for building and testing APIs

From $0/mo

About Postman

Postman has evolved from a simple HTTP client into a full API lifecycle platform covering design, mocking, testing, documentation, and monitoring. Collections allow organizing requests into shareable, executable API docs that can double as test suites. Environments and variables make switching between dev, staging, and production seamless. The built-in test runner supports JavaScript-based assertions and can integrate with CI/CD pipelines via Newman CLI. Postman Flows provides a no-code visual way to chain API calls for automation. The platform's collaboration features let teams share collections, comment on requests, and maintain a single source of truth for API contracts.

Key Features

REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket testing

Collections for organizing and sharing requests

Environment variables for multi-stage testing

Automated test scripts in JavaScript

Newman CLI for CI/CD integration

API mock servers

API documentation generation

Postman Flows visual API chaining

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Industry standard — virtually every API ships with a Postman collection
• Collection Runner and Newman enable real automated API testing in CI
• Environment variable system elegantly handles multi-stage API testing
• Collaboration and sharing make it a team API knowledge base

Cons

• Desktop app has become noticeably bloated and slow in recent versions
• Free tier collection limit (3) is extremely restrictive for real projects
• Offline functionality degraded significantly after cloud-first push
• Requires account login even for basic local usage — privacy concern for some

Best For

Backend developers testing and debugging APIs QA engineers building API test suites Teams maintaining shared API documentation DevOps engineers integrating API tests in CI/CD