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Google Maps vs Postman: What are the differences?
Functionality: Google Maps is primarily used for navigation, location-based services, and exploring places on a map. It provides real-time traffic updates, satellite imagery, and street view. On the other hand, Postman is designed for API development, testing, and collaboration. It allows users to make API requests, organize APIs into collections, and test different endpoints.
User Interface: Google Maps has a user-friendly interface with interactive maps, search bars, and various layers for users to explore information. It is visually appealing and easy to navigate, making it popular among general users. In contrast, Postman has a more technical interface tailored towards developers and API testers. It includes features like request builders, response viewers, and collections for managing APIs.
Purpose: Google Maps is aimed at providing users with geographic information, driving directions, and location-based services for everyday use. It caters to a broad audience ranging from casual users to businesses looking to integrate mapping functionality. Conversely, Postman is targeted at developers, software engineers, and QA professionals working on API-related projects. It streamlines the process of testing APIs, debugging issues, and collaboration among team members.
Pricing: Google Maps offers a freemium model where individuals and businesses can use certain features for free within the usage limits set by Google. Additional features and higher usage volumes require a paid subscription. On the other hand, Postman offers a free version with limited functionalities and a paid subscription for advanced features like team collaboration, monitoring, and automation tools.
Integration: Google Maps can be easily integrated into websites, mobile apps, and other platforms using Google Maps API. This allows developers to leverage mapping services within their applications seamlessly. In comparison, Postman integrates with various tools and services commonly used in API development workflows such as version control systems, monitoring tools, and continuous integration platforms.
Community Support: Google Maps has a vast user base and dedicated community forums where users can ask questions, share knowledge, and seek help on mapping-related issues. This community-driven support system enables users to troubleshoot problems and discover new ways to utilize Google Maps effectively. Conversely, Postman provides extensive documentation, webinars, and online resources for users to learn about API development best practices, use cases, and tips for optimizing their workflow.
In Summary, Google Maps is a mapping service for navigation and location-based services, while Postman is an API development and testing tool tailored for developers and QA professionals. The key differences lie in their functionality, user interface, target audience, pricing, integration capabilities, and community support.
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?"
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).
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.
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.
From a StackShare Community member: "We're a team of two starting to write a mobile app. The app will heavily rely on maps and this is where my partner and I are not seeing eye-to-eye. I would like to go with an open source solution like OpenStreetMap that is used by Apple & Foursquare. He would like to go with Google Maps since more apps use it and has better support (according to him). Mapbox is also an option but I don’t know much about it."
I use Mapbox because We need 3D maps and navigation, it has a great plugin for React and React Native which we use. Also the Mapbox Geocoder is great.
I use OpenStreetMap because that has a strong community. It takes some time to catch up with Google Maps, but OpenStreetMap will become great solution.
Google Maps is best because it is practically free (they give you $300 in free credits per month and it's really hard to go over the free tier unless you really mean business) and it's the best!
I use Google Maps because it has a lot of great features such as Google's rich APIs, geolocation functions, navigation search feature, street map view, auto-generated 3D city map.
I use OpenStreetMap because i have the control of the environment, using Docker containers or bare-metal servers.
(1/3) Google Maps: We will use Google Maps to find locations of businesses we think require licenses so that we can estimate the cost to benefit ratio for different businesses and give better recommendations on how to proceed. Google maps data will also be used to price travel plans.
Postman: Postman is a great tool for testing endpoints of our web app. This will also help us create a CI for our endpoints.
Python: We are using python to develop our web app. We chose to use this since we will be integrating a lot of machine learning and statistical models into our app and python has great libraries to support this.
Django: Since we are using python due to it’s incredible support for machine learning and data science, we have also decided to use it to develop the web app to make the integration of the front end and back end easier. In addition this means no microservices allowing for more maintainable, testable code.
Scrapy: A Python web based framework which will help gather data from various endpoints. Low overhead, combined with direct integration to backend makes it an ideal choice as we will not have to microservice scraping.
Postman will allow us to streamline our development by letting us create, test, and debug our API endpoints more efficiently and effectively. This is crucial to us because our application will likely require several endpoints working in conjunction. The Postman interface is straightforward and powerful, allowing easily-customization requests and headers, and providing detailed API response data. Postman also has extensive support for testing, allowing the storage and execution of collections of API calls.
We will be using Google Maps Platform for both its Maps API as well as its Places API to obtain the geolocation and business information that our application will require. Based on our research, there is no equivalent free API that provides a similar feature set.
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.
Pros of Google Maps
- Free253
- Address input through maps api136
- Sharable Directions82
- Google Earth47
- Unique46
- Custom maps designing3
Pros of Postman
- Easy to use490
- Great tool369
- Makes developing rest api's easy peasy276
- Easy setup, looks good156
- The best api workflow out there144
- It's the best53
- History feature53
- 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
- Collections8
- Option to run scrips8
- Global/Environment Variables8
- Shareable Collections7
- Dead simple and useful. Excellent7
- Dark theme easy on the eyes7
- Awesome customer support6
- Great integration with newman6
- Documentation5
- Simple5
- The test script is useful5
- Saves responses4
- This has simplified my testing significantly4
- Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,34
- Easy as pie4
- API-network3
- I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis3
- Mocking API calls with predefined response3
- Now supports GraphQL2
- Postman Runner CI Integration2
- Easy to setup, test and provides test storage2
- Continuous integration using newman2
- Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable2
- Runner2
- Graph2
- <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>1
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Cons of Google Maps
- Google Attributions and logo4
- Only map allowed alongside google place autocomplete1
Cons of Postman
- 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
