REST Assured vs Insomnia
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
Free and open source
Open sourceFrom $12 per user/month (Pro; ~17% off billed annually)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
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.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Essentials is free for up to 3 users, including local and cloud projects, CLI and 1,000 mock requests a month.
Open source
Apache-2.0
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
OSS community · since 2010
Widely used
Kong · since 2016
Strengths
- API tests live in the codebase, versioned and reviewed with the service.
- Readable given/when/then chains that map directly onto HTTP semantics.
- Full access to Java for setup, data and assertions.
- 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.
Limitations
- Java only, and requires developers rather than manual testers.
- No GUI, so exploratory request work needs a separate client.
- Verbose for very large payload assertions.
- 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.
Best for
JVM teams that want API tests in the same repository as the service.
Developers who mainly want a fast client with excellent GraphQL support.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.