Postman

What is Postman?

Postman is an API platform for building, testing, and documenting APIs. It started as a simple HTTP client and has grown into a comprehensive tool covering the full API development lifecycle — from design to testing to publishing documentation. It's widely used enough that many development teams treat it as a standard part of the toolchain.

Making requests

The core of Postman is its request builder. You construct an HTTP request — method, URL, headers, body, authentication — and send it. The response is displayed with the body, headers, status code, and timing. Requests are saved and organised into collections, which can be shared across a team and checked into version control alongside your code.

Testing and automation

Postman lets you write tests in JavaScript that run after each request. You can assert on response status codes, body values, headers, and timing. Collections of tests can be run as a suite using Newman, the Postman command-line runner, which makes it straightforward to include API tests in a CI pipeline. Pre-request scripts let you set up dynamic values — tokens, timestamps, generated IDs — before each request fires.

Environments and variables

Like Insomnia, Postman has a variable system for managing different environments. You define variables for base URLs, auth tokens, and other values that change between environments, then switch between dev, staging, and production without modifying your requests. Global variables let you share values across collections.

Pricing

Postman has a free tier that covers most individual use cases. Team plans add collaboration features, more collection runners, and additional API governance tools. The free tier has usage limits that you're unlikely to hit for basic API development.