Tom Hombergs has an excellent article discussing the relative strengths and weaknesses of these approaches, which can be summarised below. Postman favours E2E functional tests, whereas Pact is a contract-testing tool.
Insomnia vs postman code#
If the consumer code changes how it interacts with the API Provider, the Postman suite would need to be manually updated or risk devolving into a false representation of the real consumer.īecause you are unlikely to have access to the source code for this sort of test, you are unlikely to be able to stub out data and dependencies easily so they can run as isolated unit tests - so it's likely that you would need to do this against a real, deployed version of the Provider in an E2E style test. For example, you won't be able to say which specific fields you are interested in with any degree of confidence.
But any tool that is not tied to the actual implementation (code) will not have the same value proposition that something like Pact can guarantee.īecause it does not have access to the code, the test author will have to manually setup expectations that will likely both drift from implementation over time and have broader expectations on a provider.
It is possible to do a pseudo contract-test using Postman, by making assumptions about the consumer code base and how it makes API calls, storing those requests as Postman collections specific to that consumer and making the provider test against that collection as part of its CI process.
Insomnia vs postman software#
CLI tools explicitly designed for continuous-delivery pipelines and enable independently releasable software components.Tests are always valid and maintained, because they are generated by the code with native integration in the language of the System under Test.
Provides guarantees consumers and providers work together, and fast developer feedback.Does not provide tools to orchestrate complex CI/CD pipelines.Delay in feedback on API issues (due to a separate testing suite).Encourages a separate test suite that requires maintenance outside of the code it is testing.Provider centricity - does not consider the consumer of the API.Postman collections make it easy to share and collaborate with others.Ability to import schemas (such as OAS, JSONSchema and GrahpQL) and use them as a basis for tests and API exploration.Easy to get started and requires little to no coding ability.Here is an at-a-glance comparison of the tools:Īll major languages (11 in total), CLI toolsīlack box (only tests from the "outside") Screenshot of Pact showing an API incompatibility ( ) Comparison Pact tests are written like any other unit test, and requires access to the code base of the System under Test to ensure that any expectations are based on how the consumer and provider behave, so that the tests can't drift from the actual implementation. Pact's main purpose is to ensure that a consumer (such as a Web App or another API) and a provider API are compatible with each other - without ever having to test them together using an end-to-end integrated test suite. When combined with Pactflow (or a Pact Broker), it becomes a powerful continuous-delivery tool. Pact is a distributed systems testing framework and importantly, it is a code-first tool for testing HTTP and message integrations using an approach known as contract tests. Screenshot of Postman (courtesy of ) Pact a Web application or another API) interacts with a Provider. Postman is purely a Provider-only testing tool, in that it can not test how a consumer (e.g.
It's ideally suited to exploring and collaborating on APIs and running functional API tests. Postman (and Newman) do not require direct access to the code for the System under Test (SUT), as they test it from the outside in a black-box style test. Postman is a collaboration platform for API development, it has a fantastic IDE-like GUI that makes it easy to explore and navigate an API and a scripting language in NodeJS that you can use to automate checks against an API Provider that you can run in your CI pipelines. In this article, we discuss the differences in approach and the pros and cons of using Pact and Postman for various API testing related scenarios. We often get asked how does Pact differ from tools like Postman, Insomnia and other REST API testing tools.
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