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Best Alternative to Postman? (programming.dev)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Hey!

I'm currently hitting the limits with Postman's free tier and need your recommendations for alternatives. My company isn't planning to upgrade to the paid version, so I'm specifically looking for:

Must-have features:

Unlimited API requests
Collection runner or similar batch testing capability
Data import from spreadsheets for test automation
The collection runner feature is crucial for my workflow: I heavily rely on being able to import Excel data to generate and map multiple API calls without manual setup.

Has anyone switched from Postman to something else that offers these capabilities? What's your experience been like?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions! 🙏

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I'm genuinely wondering, if this is a situation where the open-source community just uses curl and that's why there's only corporate gunk for those who want more features. For example, curl obviously won't support Excel import, but folks in the open-source community are also very unlikely to want that...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

You can easily write a script to make curl requests from a CSV.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Depending on exactly what you mean by importing from excel, there are libraries for Perl/Python/your scripting language of choice that will simplify that so it becomes a matter of a fairly small amount of code to build a test harness that does exactly what you want.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Well, OP mentioned an Excel import, so I'm not 100% sure what that means either. 🙃

But yeah, that's part of why I'm wondering. I hardly know anything about Postman, so I'm probably underestimating how complex this would be, but it still feels like at least the core feature-set could easily be covered by an open-source tool, if anyone in the open-source community had that itch to scratch.
Maybe it's also just solving a problem that only companies have? The webpage mentions some things about centrally managing API definitions. Do not ask me why the API definitions are not in a repo. But I guess, if you join a company that works like that, you're not going lean up against that...