Charles vs Paw vs Postman

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

Charles

141
166
+ 1
0
Paw

230
277
+ 1
164
Postman

94K
80.6K
+ 1
1.8K
Advice on Charles, Paw, and Postman
Needs advice
on
PostmanPostmanApiaryApiary
and
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?"

See more
Replies (3)
Jagdeep Singh
Tech Lead at ucreate.it · | 8 upvotes · 390.7K 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).

See more

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.

See more
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.

See more
Decisions about Charles, Paw, and Postman

OpenAPI is an excellent tool for creating interactive and hosted documents when releasing an API to the public. We will leverage this, specifically for the public facing APIs that customers can integrate into (to automate creating projects and storing experiment data). Postman is more complicated to share with others and is not as rich for documentation.

See more
Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 1 upvote · 344.7K 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.

See more
Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
Learn More
Pros of Charles
Pros of Paw
Pros of Postman
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 46
      Great interface
    • 37
      Easy to use
    • 25
      More stable and performant than the others
    • 16
      Saves endpoints list for testing
    • 13
      Supports environment variables
    • 12
      Integrations
    • 9
      Multi-Dimension Environment Settings
    • 4
      Paste curl commands into Paw
    • 2
      Creates code for any language or framework
    • 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>

    Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

    Cons of Charles
    Cons of Paw
    Cons of Postman
      Be the first to leave a con
      • 3
        It's not free
      • 2
        MacOS Only
      • 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

      What is Charles?

      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.

      What is 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.

      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 Charles?
      What companies use Paw?
      What companies use Postman?

      Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

      What tools integrate with Charles?
      What tools integrate with Paw?
      What tools integrate with Postman?
        No integrations found
          No integrations found

          Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

          What are some alternatives to Charles, Paw, and Postman?
          Fiddler
          It is a free web debugging proxy for any browser, system or platform. It helps you debug web applications by capturing network traffic between the Internet and test computers. The tool enables you to inspect incoming and outgoing data to monitor and modify requests and responses before the browser receives them.
          JavaScript
          JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
          Git
          Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
          GitHub
          GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together.
          Python
          Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.
          See all alternatives