An underdog postman alternative: Bruno

TL;DR

• Postman has introduced a login requirement and pricing model changes, causing dissatisfaction.
• Synchronization issues with Postman highlight the need for simpler collaborative solutions.
• Bruno offers file-based synchronization, making version control and collaboration straightforward.
• Bruno is being actively developed and has a fair one-time payment pricing model

Testing APIs is an essential part of backend development. Last year, Postman pushed its login requirement further and, in my opinion, released an absurd pricing model (which they are currently revising). As a result, I started looking for alternatives since I had been dissatisfied with Postman, especially in collaborative work, for some time.

For example, synchronizing Postman Collections is only possible with Postman's cloud feature. I fully understand that this makes perfect sense from a business perspective for Postman, but from a user’s perspective, there are much simpler ways for collaborative work, such as using Git.

Without cloud synchronization, a manual export of the Postman Collection is necessary for any change to an API endpoint (e.g., because I added a property to the request payload). If a colleague updates the repository, they receive no information that the collection has changed and must import it into Postman themselves.

This is where Bruno comes in, the alternative I found during my search and which immediately appealed to me. For example, Bruno has a simple solution to the mentioned synchronization problem. Bruno works on a file basis, making changes to a collection automatically visible in the files and thus in version control. Colleagues also receive the new status in Bruno directly when updating the repository and can work with the current collection. Simple yet brilliant, simply because Bruno doesn’t have to follow any overarching business purpose. Of course, Postman could easily implement such a feature as well.

As I tried to migrate some of my projects to bruno as a first hands on experience and proof of concept, i had an issue and created an Issue on GitHub. I received a response right away, and a pragmatic solution was proposed. It's always great to experience such direct interaction and progress.

The migration worked for the majority of requirements, although one has to admit that Bruno's usability cannot yet compete with Postman in some areas. Especially the migration of Postman Scripts can be time-consuming and requires some re-alignment of code snippets and used requirements. However, this is more of an issue with Postman scripts in general.

Bruno is continuously being developed, and there is already a pricing model, which I think is a good sign. Especially because the pricing model is very fair (one-time payment), setting the right course for the future, so as not to forgo a simple Git synchronization due to the business model.

To conclude, here is the development of Bruno’s GitHub stars up to now since the start of the project in October 2022. If I remember correctly, Insomnia also announced the cloud requirement in October 2023.

Here is also a link to more alternatives from a Reddit article on this topic.