Step CI vs Insomnia

Free and open source

From $12 per user/month (Pro; ~17% off billed annually)

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.

Everything, self-hosted

Essentials is free for up to 3 users, including local and cloud projects, CLI and 1,000 mock requests a month.

Emerging

Step CI · since 2022

Widely used

Kong · since 2016

• YAML workflows are easy to review in a pull request and need no runtime knowledge.
• Generates a starting suite from an OpenAPI spec.
• Includes basic load-testing capability in the same file format.

• 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.

• Looks dormant: the last npm release (2.8.2) was June 2024 and the last commit August 2024, so treat it as unmaintained until that changes.
• YAML hits a ceiling on complex conditional logic.
• Ecosystem and reporting are thin compared to established tools.

• 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.

Hard to recommend for new work while it sits unmaintained; Bruno or Schemathesis cover the same ground with active development.

Developers who mainly want a fast client with excellent GraphQL support.