Postman vs Insomnia vs Bruno: Which API Client Should You Use in 2025

Three tools, three philosophies. Postman is the 30-million-user incumbent that wants to be your entire API platform. Insomnia is the focused client that got acquired, changed hands again, and is still figuring out its identity. Bruno is the upstart that stores your requests as plain text files on your disk and refuses to sync anything to a cloud it doesn’t control.

If you’re picking one in 2025, the decision comes down to less obvious questions than feature checklists: Where does your API collection live? Who can read it? What happens when the vendor changes its pricing model?

Here’s how the three compare, and who each one actually fits.

The 30-Second Version

• Postman — The most complete platform. Best for teams that need collaboration, mock servers, monitoring, and CI integration in one place. Heaviest and most cloud-dependent.
• Insomnia — A polished, developer-friendly client with strong GraphQL and gRPC support. Owned by Kong since 2019. Good middle ground, but its direction has shifted more than once.
• Bruno — Offline-first, Git-native, open source. Your collections are .bru files in a folder you own. Best for developers who want version control without a vendor account.

Postman: The Platform Play

Postman started in 2012 as a Chrome extension for testing APIs. It’s now a full API lifecycle platform with over 30 million registered users, and the free tier is genuinely generous: unlimited requests, unlimited collections, and cloud sync across devices.

Where Postman wins is team workflow. Shared workspaces, role-based permissions, comments on requests, API documentation generation, mock servers, and scheduled monitors all live in one interface. The CLI tool, Newman, runs collections in CI pipelines, which makes it possible to treat API tests as code without building your own harness.

The tradeoffs are real, though. Postman’s collections are stored in its own JSON format, which is verbose and produces noisy Git diffs if you try to version them yourself. The desktop app has grown heavy — startup times and memory use are common complaints. And in 2023, Postman removed its free tier for team collaboration, requiring a paid plan for more than a handful of users. That decision pushed a noticeable number of developers to look elsewhere.

Postman also now requires an account for most functionality, and its cloud sync means your request data — including headers, tokens you’ve saved as variables, and environment values — lives on Postman’s servers unless you configure things carefully.

Best for: Teams that want an all-in-one platform and don’t mind the cloud dependency or the price.

Insomnia: Polished, But With a Wandering Roadmap

Insomnia built its reputation on being lighter and cleaner than Postman, with particularly good support for GraphQL queries and gRPC. Kong acquired it in 2019, and for a while it was the obvious “Postman alternative” recommendation.

Then came the friction. In 2023, Insomnia pushed a mandatory account requirement for cloud sync, and users who wanted to keep working locally found the experience increasingly awkward. Kong walked some of that back after backlash, but the episode left a mark. More recently, Insomnia 9 and 10 releases have reworked the storage layer and UI, and the product’s positioning has shifted between a standalone client and a piece of Kong’s larger API governance story.

To be fair, Insomnia is still a strong client. The interface is fast, the keyboard-driven workflow is excellent, and if your team is already in Kong’s ecosystem, the integration makes sense. It supports environment variables, plugins, and code generation across many languages.

The concern isn’t quality — it’s predictability. When a tool’s ownership and monetization strategy change, your workflow is exposed to decisions you don’t control. That’s not a reason to avoid it outright, but it’s a factor worth weighing if you’re committing a team to it.

Best for: Individual developers and small teams who want a fast, polished client and are comfortable with Kong’s ecosystem.

Bruno: Files on Disk, Git in the Loop

Bruno arrived in 2023 with a simple, almost contrarian premise: your API collection should be a folder of plain text files, not a record in someone’s database.

That’s the whole idea, and it turns out to solve a lot of problems. Bruno stores each request as a .bru file — a readable, diff-friendly format. You commit the folder to Git like any other source code. Branches, pull requests, code review, and merge conflict resolution all work the way they already do for the rest of your codebase. No export/import dance, no proprietary JSON blobs, no account required.

Bruno is open source (MIT licensed), fully offline by default, and free. It supports the essentials well: environments, variables, scripting with JavaScript, collection runners, and a CLI for CI. GraphQL and gRPC support have been improving, though they’re less mature than Insomnia’s.

The honest limitations: Bruno is younger, so the ecosystem is smaller. Integrations are fewer, the UI is less polished than the incumbents, and some advanced features Postman offers — mock servers, monitoring, API documentation portals — simply don’t exist. If you need those, Bruno isn’t a replacement.

But for the core job — sending requests, organizing them, and sharing them with a team through version control — Bruno does it cleanly, and it does it without asking for an account or a credit card.

Best for: Developers and teams who live in Git, value data ownership, and don’t need a full API platform.

Head-to-Head on What Matters

Data ownership. Bruno wins outright. Files on your disk, no account, no sync. Postman and Insomnia both default toward cloud storage tied to an account, though both offer local options.

Collaboration. Postman wins. Shared workspaces, permissions, and comments are baked in. Bruno’s collaboration model is Git, which is powerful but assumes your teammates know Git. Insomnia sits in between.

Git-friendliness. Bruno, by design. Postman’s export format is noisy in diffs. Insomnia’s storage format has changed across versions, which complicates long-term version control.

GraphQL and gRPC. Insomnia has the edge, with Postman close behind. Bruno’s support is functional but less refined.

CI and automation. Postman’s Newman is the most mature option. Bruno’s CLI is capable and simpler to wire up. Insomnia’s CLI exists but is less commonly used in pipelines.

Cost. Bruno is free and open source. Postman and Insomnia both have usable free tiers for individuals, with paid plans for team features.

Extensibility. Postman has the largest ecosystem of integrations and public collections. Insomnia has a plugin system. Bruno is the most limited here.

How to Decide

Ask yourself three questions.

Does your team need a platform or a client? If you need mock servers, monitoring, documentation generation, and a shared workspace with permissions, Postman is the pragmatic choice — and the cost is justified. If you just need to send requests and share them, you’re overpaying in complexity.

Where do you want your API definitions to live? If the answer is “in our Git repo, next to the code,” Bruno is the only one of the three built around that from day one.

How much do you care about vendor stability? Postman and Insomnia have both changed their free-tier terms in ways that frustrated users. Bruno’s open-source, file-based model is structurally resistant to that — there’s no server to shut down and no pricing page to change.

A reasonable middle path some teams take: Bruno for day-to-day development and version-controlled collections, Postman for the platform features that Bruno doesn’t offer. Nothing stops you from using both.

The Takeaway

There’s no universal winner in 2025, and the “best” tool depends on whether you’re optimizing for platform completeness, client polish, or ownership and portability.

Postman remains the safest pick for teams that need a full API platform and can absorb the cost and cloud dependency. Insomnia is a fast, capable client best suited to developers already comfortable in Kong’s orbit. Bruno is the right answer for anyone who wants their API collection to be plain files in a Git repo — and who’d rather not hand that data to a vendor at all.

Pick based on where your collections should live and who needs to access them. The feature lists matter less than that.