Insomnia

Insomnia is an open-source, highly efficient desktop application used in the creation, debugging, testing, and documentation of RESTful and GraphQL APIs. The software was initially developed by Gregory Schier before being purchased by Kong Inc. Insomnia is considered one of the best alternatives to Postman because of its minimalist nature, light structure, and developer-centered ethos.

While other API development tools have a cloud-first workflow, Insomnia operates with a local-first workflow. For example, users can store their projects, collections, and other sensitive information such as API keys either locally or in their private Git repos without storing them on Insomnia’s servers unless they opt for cloud syncing.

The Insomnia API client has a neat and distraction-free interface that doesn’t have the modal windows and sidebar distractions that come with many other API client interfaces. The software also supports various protocols: REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSockets, and SOAP.

The platform has a free and open source codebase (licensed under Apache-2.0) , giving developers the ability to create extensions for Insomnia as well as integrate with CI/CD pipelines using the Inso command line interface. Besides being useful for individual users and small teams, Insomnia also comes with enterprise-grade capabilities such as SSO, RBAC, and audit logging.

Key Features

• Multi-Protocol Request Handling: Process HTTP, REST, GraphQL (schema explorer and query editor included), gRPC, WebSockets, and SOAP protocol requests from one interface only.
• Offline & Git Repository Support: API collections and environment variables can be kept locally or checked into Git repositories directly. A cloud-based subscription is not necessary for all functions.
• Environment Variable Management & Template Usage: Work with variables that exist on the global, collection, or folder level. Implement templates for UUIDs, timestamps, and chaining API responses.
• API Design & Documentation Tools: Import, create, or export OpenAPI (Swagger) documentation files. View API designs instantly, independent of any cloud service.
• Response Value Chaining: Retrieve data from previous API responses (from bodies, headers, and raw body contents) and reuse the retrieved values in your next requests.
• Pre-request & Test Scripts: Add JavaScript pre-request or post-response scripts which will execute before making any request (with dynamic data) or validating test cases with assertions after getting the response.
• Collections Runner & CLI (Inso) : Execute complete collection(s) one by one using the inbuilt Collections runner or perform automated tests in CI/CD using Inso.
• Mock Servers: Generate mock servers which can generate response according to your example or specification. This includes cloud-based mock as well as self-hosted (on-premises).
• Plugin System: Customize functionality with plugins provided by the community. There are various plugins available for custom auth, code gen, themes, and other third-party integrations.
• Code Gen: Automatically create client side code (cURL, JS, python, go) out of any request you make using Postman.
• Environment Vault: Store environment variables locally while encrypting their value and do not need cloud-based vaults for that.
• Workspaces & Projects: Organize your requests, environments, and specs in projects and workspaces.