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.
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.