Postman vs Insomnia vs Bruno: Best API Client for REST and GraphQL Testing
Three API clients now dominate the conversation among developers who test REST and GraphQL endpoints: Postman, Insomnia, and Bruno. Each has a distinct philosophy, and the “best” one depends heavily on how your team works, what you value in a tool, and whether you care about where your collections live.
The stakes are higher than they used to be. Postman’s 2023 decision to retire Scratch Pad and push users toward cloud-synced accounts triggered a visible backlash, and Insomnia’s 2023 acquisition by Kong came with a license change that frustrated some of its long-time users. Bruno entered the market in 2022 with a direct pitch: a fast, offline-first client that stores collections as plain files on your disk. That pitch has resonated. As of 2025, Bruno’s GitHub repository has surpassed 30,000 stars, and the project has shipped dozens of releases with a rapid cadence.
Here’s how the three compare on the dimensions that matter for day-to-day REST and GraphQL testing.
The core philosophies at a glance
| Postman | Insomnia | Bruno | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Storage model | Cloud-first (workspaces sync by default) | Local or cloud, depending on plan | Local files (Git-friendly) |
| Licensing | Proprietary, freemium | Proprietary, freemium (Kong) | Open source (MIT) |
| GraphQL support | Strong, with schema introspection | Strong, dedicated GraphQL editor | Solid, with schema support |
| Best for | Large teams, enterprise workflows | Individual devs and small teams | Git-centric, privacy-minded teams |
None of these are toy tools. All three handle REST comfortably, support environments and variables, and offer some form of test scripting. The differences show up in collaboration, data ownership, and the GraphQL experience.
Postman: the enterprise default
Postman is the incumbent, and for good reason. It has the deepest feature set of the three: a full-featured collection runner, a built-in mock server, API documentation generation, monitoring, and a public API network with millions of shared collections. For REST testing, its request builder is mature and the test scripting (via pm.test) is well documented.
GraphQL support is genuinely good. Postman’s GraphQL request type introspects a schema and gives you autocomplete for queries and variables, which saves time when you’re working with a large schema. You can save queries, chain them with variables, and write tests against the JSON response just as you would with REST.
The friction is in the model. Postman wants your work in its cloud. Its free tier limits collaboration, and the paid tiers scale quickly for teams. For organizations with strict data-handling requirements, syncing API collections—which can contain auth tokens and internal endpoint details—to a third-party cloud is a real consideration. Postman does offer on-premises options at the enterprise tier, but that’s a different budget conversation.
Where Postman still wins: onboarding. If you hire a developer who has tested APIs before, odds are they already know Postman. That institutional familiarity has real value.
Insomnia: polished, but watch the licensing
Insomnia has long been the favorite of developers who found Postman too heavy. Its interface is cleaner, it launches faster, and it handles both REST and GraphQL in a unified workspace. The GraphQL editor is arguably the best of the three for pure query authoring—schema-aware autocomplete, a variables pane, and a query history that makes iterating on a complex query pleasant.
The 2023 acquisition by Kong introduced a wrinkle. Insomnia moved to a proprietary license and introduced account requirements for some features, which prompted forks and a wave of migration chatter. The tool remains actively developed and is genuinely good, but teams evaluating it should read the current licensing terms carefully rather than relying on older assumptions.
For individual developers and small teams, Insomnia’s free tier covers most needs. For larger teams, the pricing and the cloud dependency raise the same questions as Postman, minus Postman’s broader ecosystem.
Bruno: the Git-native challenger
Bruno’s bet is that API collections are code, and code belongs in version control. Its collections are stored as plain-text .bru files on your filesystem, which means you can commit them to Git, review changes in a pull request, and diff them like any other source file. There’s no account requirement, no mandatory cloud sync, and the app runs fully offline.
This is a meaningful difference in practice. If your team already lives in Git, Bruno fits the workflow without translation. Collection changes show up in code review. Environment files can be kept out of version control with a .gitignore. For teams with security or compliance constraints, keeping everything local removes an entire category of concern.
The trade-offs are real. Bruno is younger, so its feature set is narrower: the collection runner is less mature than Postman’s, the ecosystem of shared collections is tiny compared to Postman’s public network, and documentation, while improving, is thinner. GraphQL support is solid—schema import, autocomplete, and query editing work well—but it doesn’t yet match Insomnia’s polish. Bruno is also a smaller project with a smaller team, which matters if you’re betting a large organization’s workflow on it.
Testing REST and GraphQL: where each tool pulls ahead
For REST testing, the practical differences come down to scripting and automation. Postman’s test scripts and Newman (its CLI runner) are the most battle-tested for CI pipelines. Insomnia supports test suites and a CLI, but the ecosystem is smaller. Bruno supports assertions and a CLI runner, and its Git-native storage makes CI integration conceptually simple—your tests are already files in the repo. If your team runs API tests in CI, all three work; Postman has the most documentation and the most existing examples.
For GraphQL, Insomnia’s editor is the most pleasant for authoring queries, Postman’s introspection and autocomplete are strong and its testing story is better, and Bruno’s support is capable but less refined. If GraphQL is your primary workload, try Insomnia and Postman side by side before committing; the difference in feel is subjective but real.
So which should you pick?
There’s no universal winner, but the decision tree is fairly clear:
- Choose Postman if you need the broadest feature set, the largest ecosystem of shared collections, mature CI tooling, and your organization is comfortable with cloud-synced workspaces. It’s the safe default for large teams.
- Choose Insomnia if you want a lighter, faster client with an excellent GraphQL editor and you’re comfortable with its current licensing terms. It suits individual developers and small teams well.
- Choose Bruno if data ownership, offline use, and Git-based collaboration are priorities—or if your organization restricts where API collections can live. It’s the strongest fit for privacy-conscious and Git-centric teams, provided you can live with a younger, narrower feature set.
A practical approach: spend an afternoon running your actual test suite in two of the three. The tool that fits your workflow will be obvious quickly, and the cost of switching later is low if your collections live in a portable format.
The takeaway
Postman remains the most complete API client, Insomnia offers the most polished GraphQL authoring experience, and Bruno has carved out a credible, fast-growing niche by treating collections as version-controlled files. The right choice depends less on raw features than on how your team collaborates and where you’re willing to store your API data. For teams that live in Git and care about data ownership, Bruno is worth a serious look; for everyone else, Postman and Insomnia remain the dependable choices.