Although sometimes too much, I think the way fly.io starts their blog posts with a description of what they do is brilliant. I have no idea what Hoppscotch is and reading the first paragraphs I still don’t.
I switched to Paw a few years back (now RapidAPI and now free), and haven’t looked back. The bloat/performance issues with Postman were too much, and I’ve really enjoyed the native experience with Paw.
Still always happy to see competition in this space because the existing tools are useful, but can still get better.
Although I have a feeling that it won’t be too many years before we forget why we ever needed these API testing tools while some API consuming LLM takes over the space.
This is about their desktop app which is not open-source. Yes, it's an easy mistake to make because they use every trick in the book to make you think it is.
After determining what they do by going to the home page (postman/insomnia/bruno replacement), I saw the Google logo. Does Google seriously use such a product? These logo bars are really interesting, as everyone seems to have a different idea as to what they imply.
I looked over the home page and even then I couldn't make sense of it. Calling something an "API client" or an "Essential Tools for API Development" is utterly useless; every piece of software is an "API client". Putting "keyboard shortcuts" as a marketing point on your home page isn't exactly helping things either.
It looks like it's another of those HTTP call generator tools, like Postman but online. I guess the target audience is people who consider "API" to mean "HTTP calls", which is why it took me so long to get it.
Looks like a decent alternative for Postman now that Postman is forcing their online sync stuff down everyone's throats.
I'd say Hoppscotch is aimed more at teams looking for a Postman replacement - particularly with regards to the cloud-syncing functionality.
Our team's looked into it in the past, and unfortunately we determined that the cost of having to maintain it at a sufficient SLA + the cost of potential interruption to our critical business functions if we got it wrong was not something we could absorb at the time. Easier to just pay for Postman for the peace of mind.
Edit: ah I looked into bruno a bit more. It does syncing via git which might be enticing. I'll research more.
The sad thing is that it definitely could be. If you install Bitwarden (an Electron based password manager) from the Arch user repos, Electron is a separate dependency shared with other Electron applications. This means Bitwarden itself can be downloaded in just 5.4 MB (compressed, of course).
Tauri is not that different, though its dependency is the system browser rather than the Electron framework itself. I think Tauri's approach is better, but a lot of Electron applications could be only a few megabytes in size if dependency management wasn't done so badly in modern software distribution.
Unsurprisingly, the Linux AppImage is 87MB in size because it comes with a runtime. There's a smaller (17MB) .deb file, but I don't see any references to a package repository, so I guess on Debian based systems it'll just make you download the .deb every time to install it manually.
But it's true, more code doesn't run for free, regardless of whether some code is already running. An application is part of the OS like a VS Code plugin is part of VS Code. Emacs users know.
Seems like you have to pay for offline collection runs. I don't understand why you should have to pay for that if it isn't using their cloud to execute them.
I love hoppscotch and I'm a happy user or their PWA- not sure I understand the benefit that a framework like Tauri provides in addition? (They mention filesystem based workflows, but my understanding was that was also possible within PWA?)
Ive tried Jetbrains Http client in the past; but I felt comfortable with a simple UI like Insomnia
Mostly used Insomnia for a long time, until I came across Bruno. Its been a game changer for me. Requests get saved as plain text files and still provides a great UI to work with
Basically all the benefits of text based files combined with a nice UI.
Only issue I really have with it recently is that graphql requests are poorly documented and wonky as hell and you literally have to fight the ide to edit the query
Otherwise it's been pretty great.
Also I have nothing to do with intellij's company besides being a happily paying customer for many years.
That’s not bad either. One thing you get with Jetbrains which I don’t see there is the ability to use arbitrary npm packages to script pre and post response. There is some testing there but the features look fixed from the docs.
No actually I thoroughly researched this, and compiled a list of every Postman alternative I could find, and tried them all. This was my list at the time:
I just tried it. It feels like postman, very slow when typing json body. But it's small, and startup time is instant. I prefer bruno, but we do not talk about bruno.
The downside is that
- Only one workspace is available when offline.
- You can't point your Workspace data to a specific directory like bruno does, and manage the data like git or other clouds.
- Self-hosting login is not possible in the desktop app.
- Cannot save specific responses like postman.
- Can't create documentation for a folder/request.
Now that we've just launched, I think we have a lot to look forward to.
I hope it evolves to not force cloud synchronization like postman and insomnia, and to be free to use offline.
It's amazing how powerful and clean Postman and Insomnia both felt when they were young and followed such similar trajectories into bloat and UI-unfriendliness hell.