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Postman vs Runscope: What are the differences?
Postman: Only complete API development environment. Postman is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide; Runscope: API Performance Monitoring. Keep tabs on all aspects of your API's performance with uptime monitoring, integration testing, logging and real-time monitoring.
Postman and Runscope belong to "API Tools" category of the tech stack.
Some of the features offered by Postman are:
- Compact layout
- HTTP requests with file upload support
- Formatted API responses for JSON and XML
On the other hand, Runscope provides the following key features:
- Runscope Radar: Automatically monitor your APIs from around the globe. Integrates with PagerDuty, New Relic Insights, Keen IO, HipChat, Slack and more. Test complete API workflows with powerful assertions and notifications.
- Runscope Metrics: API performance and usage reports.
- Runscope API Traffic Inspector: Log and view API calls from any language or framework to any API to solve integration problems.
"Easy to use" is the top reason why over 463 developers like Postman, while over 15 developers mention "Great features" as the leading cause for choosing Runscope.
According to the StackShare community, Postman has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1725 company stacks & 2166 developers stacks; compared to Runscope, which is listed in 38 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.
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 Postman
- Easy to use486
- Great tool369
- Makes developing rest api's easy peasy275
- Easy setup, looks good156
- The best api workflow out there143
- History feature53
- It's the best53
- Adds real value to my workflow44
- Great interface that magically predicts your needs42
- The best in class app34
- Can save and share script11
- Fully featured without looking cluttered9
- Option to run scrips7
- Collections7
- Global/Environment Variables7
- Dark theme easy on the eyes6
- Shareable Collections6
- Dead simple and useful. Excellent6
- Great integration with newman5
- Awesome customer support5
- Documentation4
- The test script is useful4
- Simple4
- This has simplified my testing significantly3
- Easy as pie3
- Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,33
- Saves responses3
- API-network2
- Mocking API calls with predefined response2
- I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis2
- Easy to setup, test and provides test storage1
- Graph1
- Postman Runner CI Integration1
- Now supports GraphQL1
- Continuous integration using newman1
- Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable1
- Runner0
- <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>0
Pros of Runscope
- Great features16
- 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 Postman
- Stores credentials in HTTP9
- Poor GraphQL support7
- Bloated features and UI7
- Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens7
- Expensive3
- Not free after 5 users2
- Can't prompt for per-request variables2
- Support websocket1
- Import curl1
- Import swagger1