API Load-Testing / Performance-Testing with Postman. Does it Really Work?

Apparently many would like to use Postman to test the performance of their APIs. Unfortunately, Postman has not been designed for this and is lacking essential features. Still, people try. Let’s explore why Postman is not the right tool for the job.

Latest update: December 2021

What is Postman?

Postman has become a synonym for trying out, testing or debugging APIs without writing a line of code. The product has evolved into an almost complete collaboration tool for API Development and over 8 million people use it.

OK, so we have established that Postman is super popular and people use it for working on APIs.

One important aspect when testing an API is to see how it performs when many clients call the API at the same time and in a large number.

But can Postman help with this?

Let’s understand the jargon: performance testing, load testing, stress testing, …

While the above-mentioned term may seem to refer to the same thing, they are a bit different. While these terms can refer to any time of applications, I will only refer to Web APIs.