I have a Paw license and recently I started using Insomnia instead: https://insomnia.rest/
I find Paw's project management very annoying. It assumes that I am working on some project and wants me to organise everything like that. Fine, lets do it, so where are my projects? They are hidden in some dropdown that you can have fun finding.
I was on the verge of buying a licence for Paw a couple of months ago, but discovered Insomnia, and been using that instead. (Formerly used Postman before that).
To me, the functionality of Paw and Insomnia seem very similar, so the $50 licence price deterred me from purchasing Paw. If Paw was closer to the $20 mark, I might have still bought it to have in my arsenal of tools 'just in case'.
My rationale is that if there was nothing else on the market with any equivalent functionality, then $50 for Paw is a no brainer. But when there are other competitive product with equal (or greater) feature sets for free, then the pricing works against it.
I am sorry, but design is a feature as well and you have that strongly against you. I don't see myself happily using your app over something like Insomnia or Paw.
For one, I don't like that it is in the browser. I don't like the buttons on the left that are icons with no text or tooltip, I have no idea what they do. I don't like that I have to type the request verb (GET, POST, etc). The tool should help me with suggestions as they are finite. It is a shame I have to also type in the HTTP/1.1 section, again suggestions would work better. Can I create multiple requests and switch between them quickly? I usually switch through a few. There is no feedback when I press the play button, I have no idea if that is what makes requests, there is no tooltip.
Also, you say that you have all of paw's features. How do I do dynamic values in the url? How do I make and manage oAuth requests?
Update:
I can't make any requests it seems. That would seem an important feature.
We will capture this feedback so that we can get back to it. It is very helpful. Thanks.
In terms of the verb and the version, you can either select them from the dropdown, type or use dynamic values. The URL and all other input fields, certainly support dynamic values, which can be selected from the dropdown or autocompleted by typing the value text. We have wider support for transforms which can be nested like Paw and we do have variables, which can also be nested. You can build very complex dynamic expressions (http://bit.ly/2gz3OXO). These two features alone superset Paw on the same feature set.
We don't have builtin OAuth support but we are working on it. We don't have collections but you can save in projects (so files and folders).
The tool works in the browser by leveraging a minimal browser extension. There is currently work in progress to build it on top of Electron as a desktop app but it can be done in WebKit as well on Mac. We have not decided yet.
I genuinely believe this tool will improve your workflow once we add OAuth support and collections hence why I mentioned it here. And we do have a favourable licensing model which allows you to use the tool free of charge. This tool also works really well with all our other tools which allow you to fuzz, run security scans, and perform request inspection inside your browser without the need to install a proxy. You can even monitor iPhone HTTP traffic without too much fiddling (http://bit.ly/2h5nwex) and all of these features will be part of the desktop app.
You are not :) We just suck at explaining our tech very well and it takes a while to realise the value here because even I have not seen any other product offering packaged in the way we do it today - so it could be confusing initially. This is why I am starting threads like this.
The browser extension depends on the browser technology as the extension ecosystem is different for each vendor. Currently, we support Chrome and Firefox but due to Web Extensions API adoption, we will be supporting out of the box all 3 major browsers: Chrome, Firefox and IE Edge (no Safari I am afraid).
That being said, the packaged app will provide a standalone version as well which means that there is an easy transition between desktop and web users and all major platforms will be supported.
Genuine question, but why not fix your own website to tell your product’s story rather than pepper the web with small pockets of useful info about your product leaving visitors to the real deal confused?
This is a good question. Of course, we are working on it and we are also building a very complex product at the same time. So while the main site is nowhere near what we want it to be it does not mean that we cannot publicly share what we are currently doing. And yes it would have been a lot more useful if I had shown you an amazing landing page but unfortunately it is not ready yet.
I hope that some of you may see a potential and although may disagree with the styles and color schemes keep faith in us and come back to check it out later when we have landed the themes, the desktop version and the new extension.
It is still useful application and all discussed changes are in the pipeline.
> Insomnia doesn't even come close to Paw due to the amount of features Paw has that Insomnia doesn't.
Can you list some of the important for you features that Insomnia lacks? (I'm not affiliated w/ Insomnia however I'm curious what makes Paw stand out to you.)
That might be true. For me Paw's UI doesn't help me (a simple user vs a power user) to work pleasantly. I am forced in Paw to deal with Projects, difficulty to rename requests, etc.
As a self-confessed Paw fanboy, I'm kinda baffled by this. It seems a bit like complaining that you're forced to work with spreadsheets in Excel or text documents in Word. You need _somewhere_ to put the requests, and even if you don't want to have one Paw project per, err... project, you can just create one and then use it for everything and it'll even re-open it automatically every time you open the app.
And, if it helps, you can rename a request in Paw by clicking on its name in the sidebar while you have the request selected or clicking on the name where it shows up as a title in the Description panel in the middle of the screen.
Yeah, Paw is a great piece of software, but the fact that it's macOS-only is a very severe failing IMO. I bought a license and ended up switching to Windows a few months later due to circumstances outside my control, and now I regret having paid for Paw.
Insomnia looks nice, but by default it does not format URLs as links, so in a HATEOAS API you can't follow links.
Am I just missing a setting here? Seems like this is a fairly big omission, Postman even supports copying over your headers (e.g. auth token) when you follow a link.
Insomnia founder here. It now does format links but it opens them in your default browser instead of making a new request. That's definitely on the to-do list.
Also, if you want it sooner, Insomnia is open source so it's possible to help grow the project. I think the only other app that's open source is Advanced REST Client but it's still a Chrome app (I think).
Just checked out Insomnia. From a first run through with a few endpoints it does seem beautifully done. I have been dismissive of electron-based apps in the past. VS.Code started to wear that down - I never took to using it because IntelliJ & emacs cover my bases, but I played with it enough to see its excellence. Now there's Insomnia. Perhaps I need to rethink my attitude to electron apps. I am uncomfortable with their size (eg. Insomnia @ 170MB), but given the quality that's clearly possible, I'm starting to distrust that discomfort.
It seems wasteful on space (when I have fancier native apps using much less). I'm not sure it matters that much in practise (though it did recently, before I upgraded my laptop SSD size). But neither am I 100% comfortable with giving comparatively minor apps carte blanche to use as much disk space as they wish.
As I say, I'm unresolved on the matter. Really nice electron apps like Insomnia are prompting a rethink.
There are so many differences it's impossible to list them. In general, Postman focuses on having every feature under the sun (integration testing, mock APIs, etc) whereas Insomnia focuses on the core of just being an HTTP client with additional helpers to be more productive. The result being that Insomnia is not suitable for as many use cases but is has a better user experience because it's more focused. Insomnia is also open source software.
You should really try them both to figure out which one best suites you.
Totes. Another issue I've found (at least with the browser extension flavor), is that even though it is a separate window, Cmd+Tab switching between apps is totally broken by Postman. The Postman window will completely take over your Chrome instance.
Also, I'm glad I found you! Long-time user of Paw, but going to make the switch to Insomnia. Question, can I just type a JS object into request body and you stringify the JSON for me? Is that something you would accept as a PR if not?
I just switched to Insomnia because of a bug in Postman, where it wouldn't pick up changes in the body of an HTTP POST and would use something that had been sent previously. I was able to see that the data received by the server was previous values from the text field. If I cloned the request into a new tab it started working. It happened repeatedly - at some point after making edits to the body it would just get stuck and not send what was in the editor. So I switched because I can't use an app with such issues with its core functionality.
I also disliked Postman's UI, but it wasn't a deal broker. I'm not in love with Insomnia's UI, either, but I like Insomnia because it reliably sends the right request.
For quick-and-dirty things I use cURL or httpie otherwise I use Paw (and have for about a year now). I had previously used Postman before that, but even then Paw was a better app—native app so it looked better + felt faster, nicer collections, better default shortcuts, etc.
Paw has a lot of power behind it, otherwise if you're just doing basic POST requests, stick to httpie. The code generators and extensions are nice. Easily switching between environments (e.g. dev, staging, prod). History of run requests. Tying values from other requests into other requests—e.g. get an auth token from a login request, and use that in a header in all other requests. I still only use a fairly basic amount of the features too. It's a very polished app, and the devs seem good too.
Just to play devil's advocate: I do all of that in Postman, which for the last year or so has also been a native app - at least, in the sense of being non-Chrome, it's not using macOS UI elements. I think different environments is a recent feature too.
It's free, and cross-platform. And the team sharing capabilities are cheaper than Paw's. It's odd that Paw seems to bill its single platform nature as a feature.
Isn't Postman's "native" app electron-based instead of being the chrome packaged app from before? So they basically went from Chrome to Chromium and started calling it native...
For Mac users t is a feature, it means 100% dev focus on their platform and tight integration/up to date ness with all Mac features. It’s also obvious a problem, if they have windows users team mates or friends. It’s got pros and cons.
Does that matter without knowing the size of the team? If the team's 10x bigger than you'd have guessed, is it still worse if they're working on Windows & Linux platforms too?
FWIW, I do use macOS, I just thought it was an odd 'feature', not least because it makes it unportable and contributes to lock-in.
The people that seek out Mac-only software may have dwindled, but from the mid-90's through the 2000's there was a lot of pride in how Mac software looked and felt way better than other OSes.
When you have cross-platform software, even with a large dev team, there has to be huge compromises. For example, do menus go at the top (macOS) or do you have menus on each window (Windows)? Does Quit go under "File" (Windows) or under the app name's menu (macOS)? If you look at the Google apps on the iPhone, they originally looked like native iPhone apps, but since then Google apps look and work the same between OSes. This makes sense for a branding and development perspective. The few users who switch platforms for whatever reason are pleased, but for people who just use a Mac don't care about other platforms and want all their Mac software to look and work the same. Some people use Safari just because it's a native Mac app. Many people used Camino for that reason, too (Camino was a native Mac browser using Mozilla's Gecko engine developed between 2002-2012, first released a year before Safari).
As an extreme example, personally, I avoid almost all Java apps. Yes, they're cross platform, but they're ugly, slow, and usually integrate poorly with the rest of my system. JetBrains apps are the only exception that come to mind.
Hmm that’s a good point, I hadn’t thought about team size. Although even with a large team, there may be limits to what you can do if the product must be cross platform. It’s funny I use windows myself so this is not a feature for me, I’m really just trying to see it their way that’s all.
Yep. It saves a huge amount of time when testing big API features. You can also insert random tokens, other parts from the request, browser request import, OAuth integration, etc!
I use Paw almost every day and my usual workflow is:
1) Copy request as curl from the Chrome Inspector
2) Import curl command into Paw via their importer
3) Inspect request, play around with parameters etc.
That is a really great feature of Paw and saves a lot of time and is worth the money for it. I also discovered some bugs and reported them and they were usually fixed in the next release and the developer is fast and responsive about them.
I used to use Postman but never really actually liked it. It just was OK.
I found and loved Paw right up until they broke the way GET parameters work. I want to be able to edit them as part of the URL string and removing that option is obnoxious.
I still use it nearly every day, but every time I go to edit the URL and it switches to the GET param editor I cringe.
Also, I've had a PR open to fix their cURL generators escaping since June…
I have been a Paw user for 3-4 years now it's super fast and the team delivers new changes without leaving behind the existing user base.
Insomnia is good and better option than Postman and a free alternative. The OSS looks promising as well. It doesn't really matter if it's packed as a web app but electron based apps have decent quality across platforms.
Yeah, I hate that. I keep getting files that have a ".docx" extension and I have no idea what to do with them. And the designers are using some program that uses ".ps". Thanks guys.
Not sure if you try to be sarcastic or not. But yeah I expect people to chop up their PS files before they send them to me. docx at least has has free viewers. A PDF or HTML would be better.
Paw can do a reasonably good job of exporting an OpenAPI (Swagger) 2.0 description of the API, but the usefulness of the export will depend on the extent to which the Paw-user "dressed up" the request objects.
OpenAPI / Swagger is just JSON which describes the input and output data from an API's endpoints. If you want to know, prior to runtime (of your code), what kind of data an API will accept and return, and if you don't have access to the API's source code, in what would format would you prefer to have the information documented? I don't have in mind a right or wrong answer, just curious.
Well everything was defined as String even when it was expecting an Int or Bool value. But sometimes an Int still needed to be wrapped in double quotes to work. No date formats. Objects returned of type class A sometimes had only 30% of it's fields populated (like after an insert only the database ID and creation date). Fields expecting an enum like value but the expected values not specified.
I mean it makes sense if you just export some kind of Postman / Paw configuration without paying any attention to it. File > Export > Bye Bye.
Of course most of my complaints are related to a lazy programmer sending "documentation" with the absolute least amount of effort possible, but I now at least understand how it was made and why it was as awful as it was.
Indeed, it sounds like there was a bit of a problem "between keyboard and chair" when it came to the Postman / Paw user with whom you interacted.
I had good success, just recently, using Paw to knock out the broad strokes an OpenAPI description, including indications of integer, string, boolean, date, etc. After I got the hang of thinking in terms of OpenAPI, I converted the JSON to YAML and started fine-tuning and DRY'ing the description in Emacs.
I would still use Paw as an exploratory tool — it's not perfect, but I find it more convenient than maintaining a collection of scripts and snippets to experiment with API input/output. Next time I need to write an OpenAPI description, though, if I can't auto-generate it from the server code (that was the case recently), I'll just author it by hand. It's not too big of a chore when done in YAML format, with the help of "feedback loops" per ReDoc[1] and Swagger Editor[2].
This will obviously make some people think of Postman so I wanted to give my take. I, along with my team, currently use Postman (without team sync). I'd love to switch to Paw but I think we are close to getting the company to pay for team sync and I'd hate to pay $50 then have to constantly be exporting/importing into Postman<->Paw.
I'd jump on Paw for the whole team as the $10/mo for the entire team for syncing is very attractive vs Postman Pro $8/user/mo (hell, I'd pay it myself) but I am the only macOS user (the rest on linux) and while we can debate the value of electron apps all day long they do serve a purpose.
I learned about Paw and decided to try it. My API is based on Swagger (2.0) and Postman is not a very good friend of it. Paw seems to be clean and while UX is kinda sorta sometimes clunky, I see how it could be better than Postman.
But, seriously folks, the app crashed twice within half an hour. I just tried to create different environments (I run next dev version locally and also want to run against current published version). Once it failed when I created the environment and once it failed when I added a variable and tried to undo the edit. Very trivial actions and it seems that the app just doesn't receive testing. I'd expect something similar from an OSS app (I'm the tester then and I'm expected to fill bugs). And I'd probably go ahead and fix it or at least try to debug and find the root cause.
But for $50 I expect a product. I want to swipe the credit card and move on with my project.
I'm not sure why I'd use this over Postman, which is platform independent. I know some people are offended by the wrapped web-ish UI, but most of the devs on my team don't even know what an Electron app is and they use Postman everyday. And with Postman, we can run it on Windows, OS X, and Linux. And then there's the team collaboration and scripting it...
Been on the Insomnia REST client bandwagon since they were in beta https://insomnia.rest/ ... went to checkout this page and saw no reason why I'd want to change.
Also, if you want make test API calls as part of your CI process (or just want to monitor them regularly), I created my own tool: http://www.apilope.com. I always missed such features from REST API tools!
I've used it for over a year and I like it. I have to debug things like SAML IdP/SP handshakes and session management for SSO in multiple environments as multiple users.
I have Paw through my SetApp bundle that I pay €9 a month for. Don't think I'd buy it as it's basically the same as Postman though maybe a little prettier.
This is my first time hearing about `SetApp` but it sounds like an interesting concept.
How do you feel about it? How many apps from it so you use often/daily?
Worth the $10 a month?
I had a trial and found the selection for developers wasn't worth the $10.
There are a few little utilities, like the Regex tester, that are definitely neat and well made, but given the once a month I actually need that functionality, I'll just use a crappy web app for it.
Most of the software I found to be the 3rd best in its category (or worse), for example, It doesn't have OmniFocus or Things, it has a bunch of to-do list apps I've never heard of that all have poor design and UX. Besides that there's a lot of the soft of system enhancer software that I thought made my computer go faster when I was younger but that I've now realised is mostly pointless.
For me to resubscribe to SetApp, I'd want to see best-in-class apps like Things, OmniFocus, SublimeText (or even BBEdit, I'm not a fan, but it's a good Mac app), RapidWeaver (again, not for me, but good for many), Transmit, Coda, Delicious Library, etc. I'd probably pay more than $10 for that sort of selection.
Oh apologies. I'd expect that's not a like-for-like comparison. Paw is a paid app, and then has team-sync subscriptions, the former is in SetApp, the latter is not.
‣ HazeOver (dims any window without focus by a simply-configurable amount)
‣ Mosaic (window position/size management), TextSoap (quick text-cleansing recipes)
‣ Timing (track time spent in all apps/paths for client billing)
‣ Marked (Markdown editor with live preview)
‣ Paw
I am for supporting other software developers and great tools but quite honestly its not worth the $$$
Have used postman for years with no issues and recently have started using this which I think is actually great especially if you have zsh and fzf for searching what you have run previously on terminal:
Is there a way for these tools to work with something like flatbuffers? Ideally, I would import my flatbuffers definitions and the tool would (un)serialize accordingly. I usually end up writing a python script to test APIs but being able to do a lot of that with a nice interface would be useful.
Has anyone used this? How do they like it? It had to be a couple years ago (so it might have been a different iteration), I was testing out some endpoints and figured I'd try PyCharm's new features. I don't have a lot of experience with these tools since it's not a large part of my job, but trying to use it just seemed to frustrate me and slow me down. I went back to curl commands in small shell scripts.
Can someone please describe their workflow using tools like this? Right now I use Charles Proxy for everything and am not sure how this would make it better. Does someone (another team member) share you their API schema? How do you handle headers/auth that needs to be set up all the time?
$50? Ouch. I support developers making a living, but this is a market with a lot of competition, some of it free, some of it great, and some of it free and great.
If it were $19, the professional looking UI would have had me pull the trigger, but $50 is way on the other side of of my price sensitivity.
I don't use Paw (I'm a Linux-on-the-desktop user) and I have no idea who they are but a one-time $50 cost doesn't bother me if it's something that is a key tool for my job and is demonstrably better than its competitors in the market.
In other words, if it's good enough for me to spend $20 on a license, it's good enough for me to spend $50.
True, but does this do things better then postman? What's my migration cost? For that matter, why not just use curl?
There is of course, value, but there $50 price point I reserve for things absolutely critical, with little good competition - for Example Tower, or OmniFocus.
I switched to Paw after spending many hours over several days wondering why the API I was calling was working sporadically through the client I was using at the time, Postman. $50 is nothing compared to the pay my company spent for me to realize Postman was using Chrome's settings (and more importantly, cookies and caching), and thus causing me inconsistent results. I agree $50 is steep, but Paw is well worth it, and I've been thrilled to use it ever since.
For me, considering how this is a tool that I use many times each week and how tiny of a cost it is vs the average salary in this industry, $50 really isn’t extravagant, particularly if it means I can avoid piling on yet another subscription.
I value apps that try to be a good citizen on the macOS desktop, though, which puts Paw above Postman in my view. It’s likely that many don’t care about this aspect at all so I can see where overall value stacks up differently for others.
Agreed, but this tool is nowhere near the completeness of OmniGraffle, OmniOutline or OmniFocus, all of which I have purchased for full price, and gladly so.
Seriously? You can use the app for less than hour and it will pay for itself considering the hourly rate of an average programmer. A useful professional tool that will make development flow easier and save you time and fifty bucks is expensive? $19 is peanuts. I use Paw quite often and every time I use it I discover some new little detail that the developers put in. It's not a basic app, it's well-designed and it's useful. $19 - seriously that's less than what many people spend on coffee in a week. $50 is not at all expensive for a tool that used in a professional setting on a regular basis. Far from it.
Paw is worth the money. I have been using it for two years and I really enjoy working with it. The UI/UX is lightyears ahead of everything else I have tried. I haven’t used Paw for Teams but it seems expensive, especially for existing license holders.
Maybe I'm lucky, but I've used Postman quite a bit and never ran into an issue caused by it being Electron based. For that matter, my favorite code editor, VS Code, is in that same boat.
I find Paw's project management very annoying. It assumes that I am working on some project and wants me to organise everything like that. Fine, lets do it, so where are my projects? They are hidden in some dropdown that you can have fun finding.
Insomnia is much cleaner and more to the point.