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Pact vs Postman: What are the differences?
Pact and Postman are both tools used in API testing. Pact focuses on contract testing, ensuring that APIs adhere to agreed-upon specifications, while Postman is a comprehensive API development and testing platform. Here are the key differences between Pact and Postman:
Testing Approach: Pact is primarily used for contract testing, where the interactions between different services or components are tested based on predefined contracts. It ensures that APIs are compatible and consistent across different services. Postman, on the other hand, offers a complete platform for API testing, ranging from manual testing to automated testing and performance monitoring.
Contract vs Functional Testing: Pact's main strength lies in contract testing, verifying that the interactions between API providers and consumers are compliant with predefined contracts. It emphasizes verifying compatibility between services. Postman, while offering contract testing capabilities, is more versatile, supporting various testing types, including functional, performance, and integration testing.
Target Audience: Pact is particularly beneficial for teams working on microservices or distributed systems, where ensuring API compatibility between services is critical. It's best suited for developers and teams focused on maintaining API contracts. Postman caters to a broader audience, including developers, testers, and DevOps teams, providing a range of tools for different testing needs.
Integration and Automation: Pact integrates well with continuous integration (CI) pipelines, enabling automated contract testing as part of the deployment process. It helps catch compatibility issues early. Postman offers comprehensive automation capabilities too, allowing users to create automated test suites and integrate them into CI/CD pipelines.
Collaboration and Documentation: Pact focuses on generating API contracts as documentation, improving the understanding between API providers and consumers. Postman offers extensive documentation capabilities, including generating documentation from API collections, enhancing collaboration and communication between teams.
Testing Scope: Pact's primary focus is on ensuring that APIs conform to contract specifications, emphasizing the compatibility of interactions. Postman provides a broader testing scope, including functional testing, performance testing, and monitoring, making it a comprehensive platform for different testing needs.
In summary, Pact is specialized in contract testing for API interactions, ensuring compatibility between services, while Postman offers a wider range of testing capabilities, documentation, and collaboration tools, making it a versatile platform for various API testing requirements.
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.
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 Pact
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 Pact
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