Insomnia vs Postman
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 $9 per user/month (Solo, 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.
Postman reorganised its plans: Solo $9, Team $19 and Enterprise $49 per user/month billed annually — the old Basic tier is gone. The free tier is generous for individuals; costs come from collaborator seats and monitoring/mock-call volume.
Free tier
Essentials is free for up to 3 users, including local and cloud projects, CLI and 1,000 mock requests a month.
Free plan for individuals and small teams with limited collection runs, mock calls and monitors.
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Kong · since 2016
Category standard
Postman, Inc. · since 2012
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.
- Near-universal adoption — collections are a lingua franca between teams and vendors.
- Covers design, mocking, testing, documentation and monitoring in one place.
- Newman makes any collection runnable in CI without rewriting it.
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.
- Cloud-first sync raised real concerns for teams handling sensitive API credentials; the offline story has been repeatedly reduced.
- Collections stored in the vendor cloud rather than your repo make code review and branching awkward.
- The desktop app has grown heavy, and per-seat costs add up on large teams.
Best for
Developers who mainly want a fast client with excellent GraphQL support.
Teams that want one tool covering the whole API lifecycle and value ecosystem ubiquity.
All of these integrate with: OpenAPI, GraphQL.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.