170

What happened to Postman?! (programming.dev)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by aymon@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

48 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Just recently fired Postman back up and it's so different now. Finding it difficult to find my way around when all I want to do is just send a request.

I haven't used it as much in the last 3 years just because I've mostly been building APIs that expose a Swagger UI, but I definitely remember the UI being much simpler back then.

Have y'all moved on to different solutions? If so which ones are you using?

EDIT

I've been going through the suggestions, here's the list of suggestions in order of most times suggested or number of points on the comment:

top 42 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[-] purplepudding@sopuli.xyz 78 points 2 years ago

Insomnia is a bit more like classic postman, though it's kinda heading the same way too.

Ended up falling back to cURL and shell history for REST stuffs a lot of the time.

[-] aymon@programming.dev 15 points 2 years ago

I think I remember insomnia being a pretty popular alternative when I first picked up Postman. Never gave it a chance but maybe now it's the time to switch.

[-] Durotar@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 years ago

At least it's open-source, so it's hard for them to destroy the product completely.

[-] mark@programming.dev 5 points 2 years ago

Yeah works amazingly well on Linux too

[-] sirdorius@programming.dev 37 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Enshittification.

I just switched to https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.rest-client a few years ago. Way better, simpler, easily version controlled and reviewed, completely FOSS. Only downside is it's just for VSCode, if that's not your thing

[-] abhibeckert@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

This one. It's nothing at all like Postman, and that's a good thing.

[-] prwnr@programming.dev 37 points 2 years ago

check out this topic here: https://programming.dev/post/435823 where I asked question about postman alternatives not so long ago. Tons of suggestions!

[-] aymon@programming.dev 6 points 2 years ago

Perfect! There's definitely a lot of good suggestions there.

I'm just so disappointed to see Postman trying to become a more "enterprise" solution.

[-] prwnr@programming.dev 3 points 2 years ago

well, cause that’s where the most money comes from I guess

[-] beaker@programming.dev 35 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

We made the decision yesterday to dump Postman in favor of Thunder Client. As soon as I saw the push to create an account and use cloud workspaces, I knew the time would come.

(edit: correct styling of Thunder Client)

[-] attn_dfct_dev@programming.dev 7 points 2 years ago

Thunderclient

Looks great, thanks for the rec.

[-] seaneoo@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago

I’ve never heard of Thunder Client but it looks really interesting

[-] aymon@programming.dev 27 points 2 years ago

Seems investors are to blame...

[-] midas@ymmel.nl 22 points 2 years ago

That's stupid money for an api testing tool lmao

[-] stardust@lemm.ee 28 points 2 years ago

Valued at 5.6 billion dollars. Investors are fucking idiots.

[-] sup@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 years ago

And that's putting it lightly

[-] Fenzik@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

A tale as old as tech

[-] thicket@programming.dev 22 points 2 years ago

+1 for this question. Postman was a thing of simple beauty before they tried chasing the VC money

[-] stackPeek@kbin.social 19 points 2 years ago

I'm very very surprised nobody has recommended hoppscotch.io yet

[-] mark@programming.dev 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Hmm cloud-based solutions for this scare me. But ok if open source.

[-] stackPeek@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

I could be wrong but I don't think hoppscotch.io is cloud based. CMIIW

[-] tsuni@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

Hoppscotch is such an amazing project. It’s open source, selfhostable, a PWA, and does pretty much everything I used Postman for. easily best alternative for me

[-] ohlaph@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

I do like that, thanks for sharing. I'll check ot out.

[-] gongonzabarfarbin@lemmy.world 15 points 2 years ago

https://insomnia.rest/ I've been using insomnia and it's been pretty great for the most part.

[-] aymon@programming.dev 1 points 2 years ago

This seems to be one of the most popular alternatives now.

I never gave it a chance but maybe now's the time to switch.

[-] Psaldorn@lemmy.world 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Stopped using it when they started sending me emails every fucking day.

I'LL LET YOU KNOW WHEN I WANT TO TEST AN API THANKS

[-] uhN0id@programming.dev 4 points 2 years ago

This so much. Nothing worse than when a niche service emails you or push notifications you to use something you only need to use when you have a very specific need to haha.

[-] charlieb@kbin.social 12 points 2 years ago

Insomnia has that classic postman feel, but personally I switched to hurl ( https://hurl.dev/ ) I really like how simple it is once it's setup.

[-] theherk@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

This looks really nice. Thanks for posting it.

[-] Whayle@kbin.social 12 points 2 years ago

If you use vscode, you might look at the thunderclient extension.

[-] aymon@programming.dev 2 points 2 years ago

Oh this looks promising! Thanks!

[-] lemann@lemmy.one 12 points 2 years ago

This kind of thing led me to disabling feature updates on my older Postman installs, and switching to Insomnia as a replacement on systems that don't have Postman

https://insomnia.rest (GitHub)

[-] aymon@programming.dev 6 points 2 years ago

It has a similar look to the classic postman. I'm just hoping they don't go the same way postman did if they end up with big investors and ridiculous valuations.

[-] agilob@programming.dev 7 points 2 years ago

You probably want this now https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.rest-client

[-] TeamDman@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

+1, has dot env file support so you can commit your rest experiments to your repo without worrying about exposing auth secrets

[-] aymon@programming.dev 3 points 2 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion I'll try it out!

[-] fogetaboutit@programming.dev 6 points 2 years ago

time to switch to insomnia my friend!

[-] expr@programming.dev 3 points 2 years ago

I've always used and will continue to always use curl.

[-] midas@ymmel.nl 3 points 2 years ago

Yep started using https://hoppscotch.io it's basically a clone

[-] reverendsteveii@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 years ago

Ive been using something called Insomnia lately. It's a bit less fully-featured when it comes to things like env vars, but I love that I can copy any call from my browser's network tab as a curl command and just paste it right into insomnia

[-] kiwiheretic@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 years ago

I tried postman and came to the same conclusion as you. I couldn't figure it out at all. I downloaded an app for android called "ApI Tester". I might try out ThunderClient, which others have suggested, if it works on Linux.

[-] solberg@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 years ago

I’ve been using RapidAPI on my Mac. It looks quite nice, but I’ve found some parts to be a little buggy.

load more comments

this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023

170 points (99.4% liked)

Programming

18308 readers

194 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi@lemmy.nz