Insomnia vs Bruno
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
From $12 per user/month (Pro; ~17% off billed annually)
Free tierFrom $6 per user/month (Pro, billed annually)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free for small teams; Pro lifts the user cap and adds RBAC, and Enterprise at $45 per user/month adds SSO/SCIM and Kong Konnect integration.
Bruno has moved off the old one-time Golden Edition to subscriptions: Pro $6 and Ultimate $11 per user/month billed annually, with a 14-day Ultimate trial. The open-source core remains free and fully functional offline.
Free tier
Essentials is free for up to 3 users, including local and cloud projects, CLI and 1,000 mock requests a month.
The open-source app and CLI are free and fully functional offline.
Open source
Apache-2.0
MIT (core)
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Kong · since 2016
Widely used
Bruno Software · since 2023
Strengths
- Noticeably faster and lighter than Postman for everyday request work.
- Best-in-class GraphQL and gRPC ergonomics.
- Design-first OpenAPI workflow with linting built in.
- Collections live in Git, so they diff, branch and review like any other code.
- Offline-first with no forced account — a genuine compliance advantage.
- Imports Postman and Insomnia collections, making migration realistic.
Limitations
- A forced-account change in 2023 damaged trust; check the current model before standardising on it.
- Test scripting is less capable than Postman's.
- Smaller ecosystem of shared collections.
- No built-in mock servers or monitoring; it is a client and runner, not a platform.
- Younger project with a smaller ecosystem and fewer integrations.
- Team collaboration relies on your Git workflow rather than in-app features.
Best for
Developers who mainly want a fast client with excellent GraphQL support.
Engineering teams that want API tests versioned alongside the code they test.
All of these integrate with: OpenAPI, GitHub Actions.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.