What is cURL and what are its top alternatives?
Top Alternatives to cURL
- Postman
It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide. ...
- HTTPie
It is a Modern command line HTTP client – user-friendly curl alternative with intuitive UI, JSON support, syntax highlighting, wget-like downloads, extensions, etc ...
- Flurl
It is a modern, fluent, asynchronous, testable, portable, buzzword-laden URL builder and HTTP client library for .NET. ...
- FileZilla
It is a powerful and free software for transferring files over the Internet. It is a very popular FTP client and is used by webmasters from all over the world. ...
- WinSCP
It is a popular SFTP client and FTP client for Microsoft Windows. Copy file between a local computer and remote servers using FTP, FTPS, SCP, SFTP, WebDAV or S3 file transfer protocols. ...
- Cyberduck
It is a libre server and cloud storage browser for Mac and Windows with support for FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, OpenStack Swift, Backblaze B2, Microsoft Azure & OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox. ...
- AWS Transfer for SFTP
AWS Transfer for SFTP is a fully managed service that enables the transfer of files directly into and out of Amazon S3 using the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)—also known as Secure Shell (SSH) File Transfer Protocol. AWS helps you seamlessly migrate your file transfer workflows to AWS Transfer for SFTP—by integrating with existing authentication systems, and providing DNS routing with Amazon Route 53—so nothing changes for your customers and partners, or their applications. ...
- WeTransfer
It is file sharing at its simplest. It works as if your e-mail account can support those large file sizes, you type in your e-mail address and the recipient’s e-mail address, add a message, attach the file, and send. ...
cURL alternatives & related posts
- Easy to use489
- Great tool369
- Makes developing rest api's easy peasy276
- Easy setup, looks good156
- The best api workflow out there144
- History feature53
- It's the best53
- Adds real value to my workflow44
- Great interface that magically predicts your needs43
- The best in class app35
- Can save and share script12
- Fully featured without looking cluttered10
- Global/Environment Variables8
- Collections8
- Option to run scrips8
- Shareable Collections7
- Dead simple and useful. Excellent7
- Dark theme easy on the eyes7
- Great integration with newman6
- Awesome customer support6
- Simple5
- The test script is useful5
- Documentation5
- Saves responses4
- Easy as pie4
- Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,34
- This has simplified my testing significantly4
- API-network3
- Mocking API calls with predefined response3
- I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis3
- Runner2
- Easy to setup, test and provides test storage2
- Postman Runner CI Integration2
- Graph2
- Now supports GraphQL2
- Continuous integration using newman2
- Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable2
- <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>1
- Stores credentials in HTTP10
- Bloated features and UI9
- Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens8
- Poor GraphQL support7
- Expensive5
- Not free after 5 users3
- Can't prompt for per-request variables3
- Import swagger1
- Support websocket1
- Import curl1
related Postman posts
We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.
Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username
, password
and workspace_name
so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.
Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.
This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.
Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct
Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.
Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.
Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:
- Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
- npm as package manager
- NestJS as Node.js framework
- TypeScript as programming language
- ExpressJS as web server
- Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
- Postman as a tool for API development
- TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
- JSON Web Token for access token management
The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:
- Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
- Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
- A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
- Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.
- No support for HTTP/21
related HTTPie posts
related Flurl posts
related FileZilla posts
related WinSCP posts
related Cyberduck posts
related AWS Transfer for SFTP posts
- Easy to use1