Ultimate http clients dual - postman vs advanced rest client

It seems like everything these days comes down to WEB APIs, REST is a very popular and commonly used architecture styling, but also HTTP API are coming back and becoming more and more common over SOAP.

This really makes sense in ordering things when building a web & HTTP servers. even for websites, the decoupled approach of having separate layers for client with some generic HTTP servers, has many benefits, the important one allowing your server to be accessed with multiple clients (web, mobile apps, other servers).

We work with HTTP APIs a lot, whether we are building one, or interfacing with another as clients. and one of the main challenges is the need for a simple tool for testing, simulating and debugging the access to these web servers become a crucial need.

browsing through chrome extensions, we found probably two of the best tools out there: Postman vs Advanced REST API.

Let the games begin…

Basic Features

Both have a good features list, The basic get/post/put/delete. Postman added all options available, and rest client simply added an option to send custom request type.

On Both you can attach to header, set payload for supported requests. when we drilled down we found the option to set values for authentication on postman to be extremely useful, and the all option to set parameters seems to be better.

Postman wins, 1-0.

Postman also has additional features for premium users, like the runner . we did not cover them here in order to keep things free and fair.

History and saved requests

Both have these options installed, we also came across some API that posts their testing to postman for other to use. you can set up projects or collections or both in order to collect several saved requests. Postman was more packed with option in this category but ARC was simpler to use – and so it win his first point. we also liked ARC ability to save to google drive better than simple save and sync of postman.

1-1.

UI/UX

You can see that postman was invested in this field, although we like the simple boxes of ARC, and we must admit postman feels more professional and comfortable.

2-1 postman leads

Overall usage

Both where very nice, we couldn’t really decide, there wasn’t any task we tried that could do in one and not the other. As we felt this must have a winner – we ended up with postman by a small margin, due to its extensive features and overall professional yet simple UX, the all community and docs also helped decide here.. 3-1 for postman, and this match is over.