Insomnia

What is Insomnia?

Insomnia is a desktop API client for testing REST and GraphQL endpoints. It provides a clean interface for constructing requests, inspecting responses, and organising your API work into collections. It's a popular alternative to Postman, particularly for developers who find Postman's feature set heavier than they need.

Request building

You can set up HTTP requests with custom headers, query parameters, and request bodies in multiple formats — JSON, form data, multipart, XML. GraphQL requests get their own first-class interface with a schema explorer and inline documentation pulled from your API's introspection endpoint. Requests can be organised into folders and collections and shared across a team.

Environment variables

Insomnia has a robust environment system that lets you define variables for different contexts — development, staging, production — and switch between them without editing your requests. You can reference variables in URLs, headers, and body values using a template syntax. This makes it straightforward to run the same request against different environments without duplication.

Plugins and extensibility

Insomnia supports plugins for adding custom functionality — authentication handlers, custom request hooks, response processors, and more. The plugin ecosystem is smaller than Postman's but covers most common use cases. You can also write your own plugins in JavaScript if you need something specific.

Pricing

Insomnia has a free tier that covers individual use with local storage. Paid plans add cloud sync, team collaboration, and git sync for storing collections in a repository. The free version is fully functional for solo development work.