Postman vs Charles vs Amazon API Gateway Comparison | StackShare

Overview

Postman

Stacks96.5K

Followers82.5K

Votes1.8K

Forks0

Charles

Stacks142

Followers167

Votes0

Amazon API Gateway

Stacks1.4K

Followers1.1K

Votes45

Advice on Postman, Charles, Amazon API Gateway

Jagdeep

Tech Lead at Founder and Lightning

May 6, 2019

Reviewon

Postman

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).

410k views410k

Comments

StackShare

May 1, 2019

Needs advice

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?"

382k views382k

Comments

Stephen

Artificial Intelligence Fellow

Feb 4, 2020

Decided

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.

361k views361k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Postman	Charles	Amazon API Gateway
It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.	Charles is a web proxy (HTTP Proxy / HTTP Monitor) that runs on your own computer. Your web browser (or any other Internet application) is then configured to access the Internet through Charles, and Charles is then able to record and display for you all of the data that is sent and received.	Amazon API Gateway handles all the tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls, including traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, and API version management.
Compact layout;HTTP requests with file upload support;Formatted API responses for JSON and XML;Image previews;Request history;Basic Auth, OAuth 1.0, OAuth 2.0, and other common auth helpers;Autocomplete for URL and header values;Key/value editors for adding parameters or header values. Works for URL parameters too.;Use environment variables to easily shift between settings. Great for testing production, staging or local setups.;Keyboard shortcuts to maximize your productivity;Automatically generated web documentation;Mock servers hosted on Postman’s cloud;API monitoring run from Postman cloud	SSL Proxying – view SSL requests and responses in plain text;Bandwidth Throttling to simulate slower Internet connections including latency;AJAX debugging – view XML and JSON requests and responses as a tree or as text;AMF – view the contents of Flash Remoting / Flex Remoting messages as a tree;Repeat requests to test back-end changes;Edit requests to test different inputs;Breakpoints to intercept and edit requests or responses;Validate recorded HTML, CSS and RSS/atom responses using the W3C validator	Build, Deploy and Manage APIs; Resiliency;API Lifecycle Management;SDK Generation;API Operations Monitoring;AWS Authorization;API Keys for Third-Party Developers
Statistics
GitHub Forks 0	GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 96.5K	Stacks 142	Stacks 1.4K
Followers 82.5K	Followers 167	Followers 1.1K
Votes 1.8K	Votes 0	Votes 45
Pros & Cons
Pros 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 Cons 10 Stores credentials in HTTP 9 Bloated features and UI 8 Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens 7 Poor GraphQL support 5 Expensive	No community feedback yet	Pros 37 AWS Integration 7 Websockets 1 Serverless Cons 2 No websocket broadcast 1 Less expensive
Integrations
HipChat Keen Slack Dropbox Datadog PagerDuty Bigpanda Microsoft Teams Newman VictorOps	No integrations available	AWS Lambda Amazon CloudWatch

What are some alternatives to Postman, Charles, Amazon API Gateway?

Swagger UI

Swagger UI is a dependency-free collection of HTML, Javascript, and CSS assets that dynamically generate beautiful documentation and sandbox from a Swagger-compliant API

Paw

Paw is a full-featured and beautifully designed Mac app that makes interaction with REST services delightful. Either you are an API maker or consumer, Paw helps you build HTTP requests, inspect the server's response and even generate client code.

Kong

Kong is a scalable, open source API Layer (also known as an API Gateway, or API Middleware). Kong controls layer 4 and 7 traffic and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform.

Apiary

It takes more than a simple HTML page to thrill your API users. The right tools take weeks of development. Weeks that apiary.io saves.

Karate DSL

Combines API test-automation, mocks and performance-testing into a single, unified framework. The BDD syntax popularized by Cucumber is language-neutral, and easy for even non-programmers. Besides powerful JSON & XML assertions, you can run tests in parallel for speed - which is critical for HTTP API testing.

ReadMe.io

It is an easy-to-use tool to help you build out documentation! Each documentation site that you publish is a project where there is space for documentation, interactive API reference guides, a changelog, and much more.

Appwrite

Appwrite's open-source platform lets you add Auth, DBs, Functions and Storage to your product and build any application at any scale, own your data, and use your preferred coding languages and tools.

Runscope

Keep tabs on all aspects of your API's performance with uptime monitoring, integration testing, logging and real-time monitoring.

Insomnia REST Client

Insomnia is a powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication for Mac, Window, and Linux.

RAML

RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML) makes it easy to manage the whole API lifecycle from design to sharing. It's concise - you only write what you need to define - and reusable. It is machine readable API design that is actually human friendly.