Pact vs Postman

Overview

Postman

Stacks96.1K

Followers82.5K

Votes1.8K

Forks0

Pact

Stacks59

Followers79

Votes0

GitHub Stars221

Forks90

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.

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Advice on Postman, Pact

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).

411k views411k

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	Pact
It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.	It is a code-first tool for testing HTTP and message integrations using contract tests. Contract tests assert that inter-application messages conform to a shared understanding that is documented in a contract. Without contract testing, the only way to ensure that applications will work correctly together is by using expensive and brittle integration tests.
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	Support for JavaScript, JVM, .NET, Python, Go, Ruby, PHP, Swift and more; Get fast, reliable feedback on the compatibility of your integrations; Ensures all your services are compatible with each other before you deploy
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 221
GitHub Forks 0	GitHub Forks 90
Stacks 96.1K	Stacks 59
Followers 82.5K	Followers 79
Votes 1.8K	Votes 0
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
Integrations
HipChat Keen Slack Dropbox Datadog PagerDuty Bigpanda Microsoft Teams Newman VictorOps	JavaScript Ruby Python .NET Golang PHP Swift

What are some alternatives to Postman, Pact?

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.

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.

Istio

Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.

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.

Related Comparisons

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.

Pact vs Postman