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testcritic

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 tier

From $9 per user/month (Solo, billed annually)

Free tier

What 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

JavaScript
JavaScriptCodeless

Platforms

API
API

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-market
Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

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.