Insomnia vs SoapUI / ReadyAPI
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 tierFree tier available
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.
SmartBear publishes no ReadyAPI price; the pricing page is a quote request. ReadyAPI is licensed per module — Test, Performance, Virtualization — and buying all three multiplies the cost, with floating licences for CI costing more than fixed seats.
Free tier
Essentials is free for up to 3 users, including local and cloud projects, CLI and 1,000 mock requests a month.
SoapUI open source is free and covers SOAP and REST functional testing.
Open source
Apache-2.0
EUPL-1.1 (SoapUI open source)
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Kong · since 2016
Widely used
SmartBear · since 2005
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.
- Unmatched SOAP, WSDL and JMS support for legacy enterprise integration work.
- ReadyAPI bundles functional, security, load and virtualisation in one product family.
- Groovy scripting escape hatch for anything the GUI cannot express.
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.
- Dated Java desktop UI that feels heavy next to modern clients.
- Project files are XML and merge badly in version control.
- Modular licensing gets expensive fast.
Best for
Developers who mainly want a fast client with excellent GraphQL support.
Enterprises testing SOAP services, message queues and legacy integration layers.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.