Postman vs Pact

From $14 per user/month (Basic, billed annually)

Free tier available

Free tier is generous for individuals. Costs come from collaborator seats and monitoring/mock-call volume, and enterprise plans jump sharply.

Libraries are free. PactFlow, the hosted broker with governance features, is a paid SaaS priced per contract/service.

Free plan for individuals and small teams with limited collection runs, mock calls and monitors.

The Pact libraries and the open-source Pact Broker are free.

Category standard

Postman, Inc. · since 2012

Widely used

SmartBear / Pact Foundation · since 2013

• 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.

• Catches breaking API changes at build time instead of in a shared staging environment.
• The can-i-deploy check is a genuinely good answer to microservice release coordination.
• Broad language support, so polyglot estates can adopt it uniformly.

• 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.

• Requires organisational buy-in from both consumer and provider teams; unilateral adoption achieves little.
• Real conceptual learning curve — most failed adoptions are misunderstandings, not tooling problems.
• Not a substitute for integration testing of behaviour, only of the contract.

Teams that want one tool covering the whole API lifecycle and value ecosystem ubiquity.

Microservice organisations where teams deploy independently and integration environments are a bottleneck.