Insomnia vs Postman

Insomnia or Postman: our take

Postman began as a simple request tool and became a full API lifecycle platform. Collections hold requests with variables, scripts and tests, workspaces share them across a team, and mock servers and monitors cover later stages. It supports REST, GraphQL, gRPC and WebSocket, and its public API network is huge. Insomnia, made by Kong, covers the same protocols with environments, request chaining and code generation in a cleaner desktop interface, plus plugins and a CLI for running tests in CI. It does less beyond sending and testing requests, which many developers see as a plus.

Both have free plans, with paid tiers for team collaboration. The bigger practical difference is where data lives. Postman has moved toward cloud accounts and sync, which drove some developers away. Insomnia lets you store projects locally, sync them to Git, or use its cloud, so you can choose. Insomnia is open source; Postman is not. Recent Insomnia versions have added account prompts, so neither is entirely free of that friction. Postman also runs in the browser as well as on Windows, macOS and Linux, while Insomnia is a desktop app for those three systems.

If your organisation needs shared workspaces, documentation, mocks and monitoring in one place, and is comfortable with cloud sync, Postman is the more complete option. If you mostly debug and test APIs, want an open-source tool, or need collections stored locally or in Git, Insomnia is lighter and gives you more control. Teams that want strictly file-based, offline collections may also look at Bruno.