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Paw vs Postman vs Runscope: What are the differences?
Interface: The main difference between Paw, Postman, and Runscope lies in their interface design. Paw offers a clean and intuitive interface that focuses on the request and response details. Postman, on the other hand, provides a more comprehensive interface with various features like mock servers, monitoring, and automated testing. Runscope has a user-friendly interface that is geared towards monitoring and debugging API integrations.
Collaboration Features: Postman stands out in terms of collaboration features as it allows team members to work together on API development projects by sharing collections, environments, and test scripts. Paw has limited collaboration features but does offer the ability to import and export API requests. Runscope also supports team collaboration by providing shared environments and shared API testing.
Authentication Support: When it comes to authentication support, Postman is known for its wide range of options including OAuth 2.0, API key, and Basic Auth. Paw also supports various authentication methods like OAuth 1, OAuth 2, and HMAC authentication. Runscope, while offering basic authentication methods, lacks some advanced options compared to Postman and Paw.
Request Building Tools: Paw is praised for its powerful request building tools that allow users to customize headers, authentication, and parameters with ease. Postman also provides a user-friendly interface for building requests and supports features like pre-request scripts and collection runner. Runscope offers basic request building tools but lacks some advanced functionalities found in Paw and Postman.
Monitoring Capabilities: Runscope excels in monitoring capabilities with features like real-time API monitoring, performance testing, and alerts for downtime. Postman also offers monitoring features like API monitoring and uptime alerts, but it is not as robust as Runscope. Paw, on the other hand, lacks dedicated monitoring capabilities and is more focused on API testing and development.
Integration Options: Postman has an extensive set of integrations with tools like GitHub, Jenkins, Slack, and more for seamless workflow automation. Paw also provides integrations with popular tools like Jenkins and Swagger for enhancing the API development process. Runscope offers integrations with services like Slack, PagerDuty, and HipChat to facilitate team collaboration and communication.
In Summary, the key differences between Paw, Postman, and Runscope lie in their interface design, collaboration features, authentication support, request building tools, monitoring capabilities, and integration options.
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.
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.
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 Paw
- Great interface46
- Easy to use37
- More stable and performant than the others25
- Saves endpoints list for testing16
- Supports environment variables13
- Integrations12
- Multi-Dimension Environment Settings9
- Paste curl commands into Paw4
- Creates code for any language or framework2
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
Pros of Runscope
- Great features17
- Easy to use15
- Nicely priced4
- Free plan4
- No install needed - runs on cloud2
- Decent2
- Collections1
- Dead simple and useful. Excellent1
- Awesome customer support1
- Import scripts from sources including Postman1
- Shareable Collections1
- Global & Collection level variables1
- Graphical view of response times historically1
- Integrations - StatusPage, PagerDuty, HipChat, Victorop1
- Run tests from multiple locations across globe1
- Schedule test collections to auto-run at intervals1
- Auto Re-run failed scheduled tests before notifying1
- Makes developing REST APIs easy1
- History feature - call history and response history1
- Restrict access by teams1
- Fully featured without looking cluttered1
- Can save and share scripts1
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Cons of Paw
- It's not free3
- MacOS Only2
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
Cons of Runscope
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