Postman vs Insomnia vs Knowi
A three-way comparison to know which is the best API tool.
Table of Contents:
- Introduction
- Postman
- Insomnia
- Knowi
- Postman vs Insomnia vs Knowi
- Integrations
- Visualizations
- Notifications
- Multi-Source Joins
- Supported Data
- Embedding
- Customer Support
- Pricing
- Postman vs Insomnia vs Knowi-Final Thoughts
Introduction
Client APIs can speed up the development process. They provide a way of bypassing some operations during web application development instead of reinventing the wheel each time. They also facilitate the sending of HTTP requests and reading the responses. Postman vs Insomnia vs Knowi are some of the tools used to connect to APIs today. In this article, we do a 3-way comparison to know where these tools stand with each other. But first, let’s have a brief overview of each tool.
Postman
Postman is an API client used by developers to create, test, share, and document APIs. It comes with an API development toolchain that can integrate with your workflow. The Postman team works with industry partners to develop an open ecosystem for building integrations that can facilitate your API projects. Postman users can create and save both simple and complex HTTP requests and even read their responses. With Postman, application developers can pass a specific set of data to their application and see whether it returns the expected result. The Postman Console also makes it possible for the teams to review the retrieved data.
This open-source solution has import and export capabilities that facilitate sharing and collaboration among team members. It was invented in 2012.
Insomnia
Insomnia is an open-source, powerful REST API client used to store and run REST API requests. It makes an excellent alternative REST API client to Postman. Insomnia is good for sending REST and GraphQL requests. Some of its features include cookie management, code generation, authentication, and support for environment variables. Just like Postman, Insomnia users can pass a specific set of data to their application and see whether it returns the expected results. The tool can return the response in the format of your choice including JSON, images, HTML pages, and PDF documents. Insomnia also allows users to create new plugins to extend its functionality. Its code generation feature allows users to generate code in 12 different languages.
Knowi
Knowi is a different type of solution to Postman and Insomnia. Whereas the other two solutions are targeted towards developers, Knowi is a full-fledged analytics solution, with REST API’s as a first-class citizen to integrate into. It can connect to more than one API, join across other SQL and NoSQL databases, and has a business user-friendly interface to visualize and interact with the data.
Postman vs Insomnia vs Knowi
In this section, we will compare how Postman vs Insomnia vs Knowi compare with each other. The following core areas will be considered:
- Integrations
- Visualizations
- Notifications
- Multi-Source Joins
- Supported Data
- Embedding
- Customer Support
- Pricing
Integrations
Postman has an API development toolchain that facilitates integration with your workflow. The Postman team builds an open ecosystem together with industry partners to create integrations that can facilitate your API projects. With these integrations, you can automate the process of sharing data and functionality between Postman and other tools that you may need during API development. So far, Postman supports integrations with 26 tools including AWS API Gateway, Bitbucket, and others.
They have a “Request an Integration” link that you can click to request the Postman team to build integration with a specific product.
Insomnia supports integration through plugins. Insomnia has a library of almost 350 plugins that are quick and easy to install.
These plugins allow you to extend Insomnia and exchange requests and data with other applications. If there is no plugin suitable for your specific use case, Insomnia allows you to build your own plugin.
Knowi provides a generic but powerful API connector that can be treated as a Datasource towards their Dataset-as-a-Service paradigm, as well as out-of-the-box wrappers around a number of cloud services with APIs (like Hubspot, Amplitude, Zendesk etc). It also provides native integrations into NoSQL databases and SQL databases MongoDB, Apache Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and others where you can combine your API data with your database data into reusable Datasets.
Visualizations
Postman has the Postman Visualizer that lets you turn your API data into charts and graphs. The visualizer provides a programmable way of visually representing request responses. You simply have to add the visualization code to the Tests for a request and the visualization will be rendered in the “Visualize” tab of the response body.
You can customize the visualizations using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript code or use charting libraries to create rich visualizations.
Insomnia is mostly used to display text content such as JSON and XML, but it can also represent rich content in formats such as HTML, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Images, Audio files, CSV, and PDF. You can use the “Preview” dropdown to change the preview mode to visual.
Knowi can be used to create customizable dashboards and visualizations. It supports more than 35 visualizations that can be used to present data visually and can be used by non-technical users.
Additionally, Knowi users can create custom visualizations using Javascript to meet their specific needs.
Notifications
Postman has a notifications feature that keeps you updated about what is happening in your Postman account. Postman allows you to choose whether to receive notifications via email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams. You have control over the types of notifications that you want to receive. You can also receive incident management alerts via Opsgenie, PagerDuty, Splunk On-Call, or Statuspage.
Insomnia sends users ordinary alerts via email. However, users can get this feature by installing the necessary plugins.
Knowi has an alerts feature that keeps users updated about changes that occur in their data or business. The alerts send real-time notifications when specific conditions, thresholds, and anomalies are detected within your data. The users can also set up alerts directly on a widget based on an anomaly, threshold, or custom condition in the data. The alerts notifications can be sent via, webhook, email, or Slack.
Multi-Source Joins
Multi-source joins facilitate the merging of data from different sources into one. Both Postman and Insomnia don’t support join operations.
Postman only has the Postman runner feature that lets you run API requests in a collection in a particular sequence. The test results of the request are logged and it can use scripts to pass data between requests and change the workflow.
Insomnia on the other hand allows the chaining of requests, which is the practice of taking information from one request and using it as input for another request. The values are passed using environment variables and template tags.
Knowi supports joins across multiple data sources to blend and store combined data. The join operations are also performed based on a common field among the data sources.
With Knowi, you can perform INNER JOIN, LEFT OUTER JOIN, FULL OUTER JOIN, RIGHT OUTER JOIN, and LOOP JOIN. The INNER JOIN is used as the default type of join operation. Knowi was built to support large-scale join operations across millions of records over multiple data sources. It also has mechanisms for optimizing the join operations for faster processing.
Supported Data
Supported data is an important feature to consider when comparing Postman vs Insomnia vs Knowi. Postman can be used to test an API against different datasets. It supports JSON and CSV files to get data for the test scripts. This data-driven approach is used when one wants to run a test with multiple sets of data.
Insomnia allows you to import and export data in Postman V2, Insomnia, OpenAPI, HAR, WSDL, Swagger, and cURL formats.
Knowi has a data virtualization feature that allows it to work with any type of data, whether structured, unstructured, small, or big data without considering the underlying data structure. Knowi users can also perform joins between structured and unstructured data sources.
Embedding
Postman allows you to share your collections (a group of saved requests) by creating a standalone “Run in Postman” button. The button allows users to fork the collections. The button can be embedded on blogs and web pages to enable consumers to import a collection and interact with APIs quickly.
Just like Postman, Insomnia allows you to create a “Run in Insomnia” button to help you run requests in a few clicks. The button can be embedded in HTML pages and markdown documents and have users run requests straight away.
Knowi has numerous options for supporting embedded analytics. Users can generate URLs of their dashboards and embed them into their external applications. Knowi users can create secure URLs of their dashboards that use parameters to control the type of data exposed to customers. It also comes with a single SignOn API feature which facilitates token exchange from users in a system to map to Knowi with user rights and permissions.
Customer Support
Postman has a learning center with docs, videos, and tutorials on how to use the API client. It also has a FAQs section with answers to various questions about Postman. You can also ask questions in its user community and get responses from other Postman users. Postman also has the Postman Answers section with code samples to commonly asked questions. You can also submit a support ticket via its chat feature on the official website.
Insomnia users can get help from Insomnia’s official GitHub repository where all coding happens.
The users can ask questions, submit PRs, and open issues. It also has an official Slack chat where users can ask questions and discuss with other users in real time. Users can also contact the Insomnia support team via email.
Knowi comes with a knowledge base that allows users to type their questions and get answers in the form of articles. As a user types a question, they get the top article suggestions that may answer their question.
It also comes with release notes on how to use the BI platform. Recently, Knowi has introduced a community forum with sourced questions and answers that may be of help to users. They also have a chat system powered by zendesk that allows users to submit tickets through which they can get back to them with answers to their questions.
Pricing
Postman has a free plan with all core tooling and collaboration for up to 3 users, plus 3 other paid plans namely Basic, Professional, and Enterprise. The Basic plan costs $12 per user/month, billed annually or $15 Per user/month, billed monthly. The Professional plan costs $29 per user/month, billed annually, or $36 Per user/month, billed monthly. The Enterprise plan costs $99 per user/month, billed annually.
Insomnia has a free plan and two other paid plans namely Individual and Team. The Individual plan costs $50 per user/year while the Team plan costs $120 per user/year.
Unlike Postman and Insomnia, Knowi has not made their pricing information publicly available. Instead, they have provided a form on their website that you can fill out to request pricing information. They have three pricing plans namely Basic, Team, and Enterprise. Each plan comes with full onboarding and technical support. Knowi also offers discounts for startups and non-profits. It doesn’t charge for email reports that require a user etc. in other systems.
Postman vs Insomnia vs Knowi-Final Thoughts
From the above discussion, you can tell that both Postman and Insomnia are API tools suitable for technical users such as developers while Knowi is a full-fledged analytics tool suitable for both technical and business users.
If you are a developer looking for an API tool with many features, choose Postman. Postman supports integration with a number of apps but you can request them to build an integration for a specific app. The tool requires you to write code to accomplish most of the tasks.
Insomnia on the other hand is an API tool with few features. It creates integrations using plugins and you can create your own plugins for specific use cases. It also requires you to write code to accomplish some tasks.
If you are looking for a full-fledged BI solution on top of API-based data and other sources, choose Knowi.
