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Alamofire vs Postman: What are the differences?

<Write Introduction here>
  1. Request Building and Sending: Alamofire is a Swift-based HTTP networking library that simplifies sending requests and handling responses, typically used in iOS development. Postman, on the other hand, is a platform-independent tool used for API development where users can create and send API requests easily through a user-friendly interface.

  2. Authentication Support: Alamofire provides support for various authentication mechanisms such as basic, digest, and certificate pinning, making it versatile for different security requirements. Postman offers authentication support through built-in methods like OAuth, Bearer Token, and API Key, simplifying the process for users during API testing and development.

  3. Testing and Automation: While Alamofire is more focused on integrating network requests within iOS applications, Postman allows users to create automated test scripts, run collections of requests, and monitor responses for API endpoints, providing a comprehensive testing environment for developers and testers.

  4. Environment and Variable Management: Postman excels in managing environments and variables, allowing users to switch between different environments (like development, staging, production) and dynamically update variables in requests, facilitating easy testing and deployment workflows. Alamofire does not inherently offer this level of environment management.

  5. Mock Server Functionality: Postman features a mock server functionality, enabling users to create mock endpoints for testing API responses without the need for a live server, making it ideal for frontend and backend developers. Alamofire, being a networking library, does not provide mock server capabilities.

  6. Collaboration and Sharing: Postman enables users to collaborate on API development projects by sharing collections, environments, and test scripts with team members, fostering efficient communication and team collaboration. Alamofire, as a library within an iOS application, does not possess inherent collaboration and sharing features like Postman.

In Summary, Alamofire and Postman differ in request handling, authentication support, testing automation, environment management, mock server functionality, and collaboration features, catering to distinct needs in API development and testing.
Advice on Alamofire and Postman
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Swagger UISwagger UI

From a StackShare Community member: "I just started working for a start-up and we are in desperate need of better documentation for our API. Currently our API docs is in a README.md file. We are evaluating Postman and Swagger UI. Since there are many options and I was wondering what other StackSharers would recommend?"

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Replies (3)
Jagdeep Singh
Tech Lead at ucreate.it · | 8 upvotes · 373.5K views

I use Postman because of the ease of team-management, using workspaces and teams, runner, collections, environment variables, test-scripts (post execution), variable management (pre and post execution), folders (inside collections, for better management of APIs), newman, easy-ci-integration (and probably a few more things that I am not able to recall right now).

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I use Swagger UI because it's an easy tool for end-consumers to visualize and test our APIs. It focuses on that ! And it's directly embedded and delivered with the APIs. Postman's built-in tools aren't bad, but their main focus isn't the documentation and also, they are hosted outside the project.

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Sadik Ay
Recommends
on
PostmanPostman

I recommend Postman because it's easy to use with history option. Also, it has very great features like runner, collections, test scripts runners, defining environment variables and simple exporting and importing data.

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Decisions about Alamofire and Postman
Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 1 upvote · 330.6K views

Postman supports automation and organization in a way that Insomnia just doesn't. Admittedly, Insomnia makes it slightly easy to query the data that you get back (in a very MongoDB-esque query language) but Postman sets you up to develop the code that you would use in development/testing right in the editor.

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Pros of Alamofire
Pros of Postman
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 490
      Easy to use
    • 369
      Great tool
    • 276
      Makes developing rest api's easy peasy
    • 156
      Easy setup, looks good
    • 144
      The best api workflow out there
    • 53
      It's the best
    • 53
      History feature
    • 44
      Adds real value to my workflow
    • 43
      Great interface that magically predicts your needs
    • 35
      The best in class app
    • 12
      Can save and share script
    • 10
      Fully featured without looking cluttered
    • 8
      Collections
    • 8
      Option to run scrips
    • 8
      Global/Environment Variables
    • 7
      Shareable Collections
    • 7
      Dead simple and useful. Excellent
    • 7
      Dark theme easy on the eyes
    • 6
      Awesome customer support
    • 6
      Great integration with newman
    • 5
      Documentation
    • 5
      Simple
    • 5
      The test script is useful
    • 4
      Saves responses
    • 4
      This has simplified my testing significantly
    • 4
      Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
    • 4
      Easy as pie
    • 3
      API-network
    • 3
      I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
    • 3
      Mocking API calls with predefined response
    • 2
      Now supports GraphQL
    • 2
      Postman Runner CI Integration
    • 2
      Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
    • 2
      Continuous integration using newman
    • 2
      Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
    • 2
      Runner
    • 2
      Graph
    • 1
      <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>

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    Cons of Alamofire
    Cons of Postman
      Be the first to leave a con
      • 10
        Stores credentials in HTTP
      • 9
        Bloated features and UI
      • 8
        Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
      • 7
        Poor GraphQL support
      • 5
        Expensive
      • 3
        Not free after 5 users
      • 3
        Can't prompt for per-request variables
      • 1
        Import swagger
      • 1
        Support websocket
      • 1
        Import curl

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      - No public GitHub repository available -

      What is Alamofire?

      It is a Swift-based HTTP networking library for iOS and macOS. It provides an elegant interface on top of Apple's Foundation networking stack that simplifies a number of common networking tasks.

      What is Postman?

      It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

      What companies use Alamofire?
      What companies use Postman?
      See which teams inside your own company are using Alamofire or Postman.
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      What tools integrate with Alamofire?
      What tools integrate with Postman?
        No integrations found

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