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Locust vs Postman: What are the differences?

Locust and Postman are two popular tools used in API testing. While both tools serve the same purpose, they have some key differences that set them apart.

  1. Architecture: Locust is a distributed and scalable tool that allows the simulation of thousands of concurrent users, making it suitable for load testing. On the other hand, Postman is a single-user tool designed for manual and automated API testing, focusing more on the functional testing aspect.

  2. Testing Approach: Locust follows a behavior-driven testing approach, where test scenarios are defined using Python code. It allows the creation of complex test scenarios with custom user behavior. In contrast, Postman uses a request-driven approach, where tests are created by sending HTTP requests and validating the responses. It provides a user-friendly interface for designing and running tests.

  3. Scripting Capabilities: Locust provides complete flexibility in scripting and customizing user behavior. It allows the use of Python code to define tasks, user actions, and request parameters. Postman, on the other hand, also supports scripting but uses JavaScript instead of Python. The scripting capabilities in Postman are more limited compared to Locust.

  4. Load Generation: Locust is designed specifically for load testing and distributed load generation. It can spawn thousands of virtual users on multiple machines, simulating realistic load scenarios. Postman, though capable of handling multiple requests simultaneously, is not specifically optimized for high-scale load testing. It is more suitable for functional testing and integration testing.

  5. Reporting and Analysis: Locust provides real-time monitoring and reporting of performance metrics such as response times, failure rates, and throughput. It also offers integration with various monitoring and analysis tools. Postman, on the other hand, provides limited reporting and analysis features. It offers basic reporting on test results but lacks advanced performance monitoring capabilities.

  6. Collaboration and Team Features: Postman provides extensive features for collaboration and team-based API testing. It allows team members to share and collaborate on collections, APIs, and test scripts. It also provides features like version control, team libraries, and API documentation. Locust, being primarily focused on load testing, lacks the built-in collaboration and team features offered by Postman.

In Summary, Locust is a scalable tool for load testing with powerful scripting capabilities, while Postman is a user-friendly tool for functional testing with collaboration features.

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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 · 392.8K 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
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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 Locust and Postman
Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 1 upvote · 346.5K 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 Locust
Pros of Postman
  • 15
    Hackable
  • 11
    Supports distributed
  • 7
    Open source
  • 6
    Easy to use
  • 6
    Easy to setup
  • 4
    Fast
  • 2
    Test Anything
  • 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 Locust
Cons of Postman
  • 1
    Bad design
  • 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

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What is Locust?

Locust is an easy-to-use, distributed, user load testing tool. Intended for load testing web sites (or other systems) and figuring out how many concurrent users a system can handle.

What is Postman?

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

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What companies use Locust?
What companies use Postman?
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What tools integrate with Locust?
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What are some alternatives to Locust and Postman?
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