Looking for a Postman replacement

I was about to start a new integration and realised I was still forced to use an old version (9) of Postman. I have had to dismiss its upgrade suggestions every time I started it because I do not like the current version not supporting the scratchpad feature. (And its Lightweight API client is too crippled.)

To me and my colleagues, Postman has been essentially a nice GUI that lets me do exactly what curl can do on the command line.

I do not want to use Postman's cloud-based features because I do not want to send my customer's test requests and example responses including credentials and potentially sensitive data to a 3rd party unless necessary.

Sharing the collections and environments with colleagues is nice, but we already use git, so why should we start depending on another collaboration repository?

So I started looking for an alternative with the following criteria

• opensource (to avoid another lock-in)
• import from Postman
• WSDL import (integration I was working on was a SOAP WS)
• simple desktop GUI app with data on local filesystem, similar to what I was used to with the old Postman

The following list is what I found and tried within the limited time I had, so it is definitely not an exhaustive comparison of everything available on the market.

Hoppscotch

https://hoppscotch.com/

Negative: It is a web application. It offers a way of self-hosting it locally, but I felt like it would be inefficient and awkward for my purposes. (Imagine invoking a localhost URL from an app running in docker...)

Positive: When checking a second time, I discovered an alpha version of a desktop application. I haven't tried it yet though.

soapUI

https://www.soapui.org/

Positive: Mature WSDL support of course. I remember using soapUI back in the day when almost all integration was done with SOAP web services.

Negative:

• As its name suggests, it stayed in the SOAP era. It has some REST support, but I read it is not as good as the SOAP one.
• No Postman import
• And the main one for me: It does not support easy switching between environments as we know it from Postman, at least not visible at first glance.

Milkman

https://milkman.dev/

Negative: no WSDL import

ApiDog

https://apidog.com/

Negative: When I started it, it welcomed me requiring a login. Exactly the reason why I wanted to go away from Postman.

and the winner is:

Insomnia

https://insomnia.rest/

Positive:

• Import of Postman collections and environments
• WSDL import
• looks very similar to Postman

Negative:

• I haven't found an import of Postman globals, but its "base environment" is a simple JSON that can be edited easily even by non-coders IMO
• no export back to Postman (in case you need a transition period...)

What is your opinion? Tell me on LinkedIn.

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