Postman vs Insomnia vs Bruno: Which API Client Is Best for Developers in 2025
Three years ago, choosing an API client was barely a decision. Postman dominated, Insomnia held a loyal niche, and most teams never thought about it again. Then in 2023, Insomnia’s parent company Kong moved its storage to the cloud and required accounts for features that used to work offline. That same year, a small open-source project called Bruno launched with a pointed pitch: your API collections are just files in a folder, stored in Git like the rest of your code. By 2025, that pitch has turned into a real three-way contest. Here’s how the tools actually compare for day-to-day development work.
The Three Contenders at a Glance
Postman remains the market leader by a wide margin, with more than 35 million registered developers and a feature surface that goes far beyond sending HTTP requests: mock servers, automated test suites, monitoring, API documentation hosting, and an API catalog. It’s a platform, not just a client.
Insomnia started in 2016 as a lean, fast REST and GraphQL client. Kong acquired it in 2019, and the product has since grown into a design-and-test tool that integrates with Kong’s API gateway ecosystem. It’s still lighter than Postman, but the cloud account requirement has been a persistent source of friction.
Bruno is the newcomer. It’s open source (MIT licensed), offline-first, and stores every request as a plain-text .bru file inside your project directory. There’s no proprietary cloud sync by default—you use Git, which most teams already have.
Local-First vs. Cloud-First: The Real Dividing Line
The most important difference between these tools isn’t features. It’s where your data lives.
Postman and Insomnia are cloud-first. Collections sync to their servers, which makes team collaboration easy but raises questions about data residency, vendor lock-in, and what happens to your workspace if you stop paying. Both offer local-only modes, but they’re secondary paths, not the default.
Bruno inverts this. A collection is a directory. A request is a text file. You commit it, branch it, review it in a pull request, and merge it. If Bruno the company disappeared tomorrow, your collections would still open in a text editor. For teams that already treat infrastructure as code, this feels less like a feature and more like a correction.
The tradeoff is real, though: Bruno’s collaboration story is Git. If your team isn’t comfortable resolving merge conflicts, or if you want a shared cloud workspace with role-based permissions, Postman is simply better at that.
Feature Depth: Where Postman Still Wins
Postman’s advantage in 2025 is breadth. A short list of things it does that the others don’t match:
- Automated monitoring: run collections on a schedule and get alerted when an endpoint breaks.
- Mock servers: generate fake endpoints from an OpenAPI spec before the backend exists.
- API documentation: publish a hosted, interactive docs site from a collection.
- Governance at scale: workspaces, roles, and an API catalog for organizations managing hundreds of services.
For a solo developer testing a handful of endpoints, most of this is noise. For a platform team coordinating across dozens of services, it’s the reason Postman keeps winning enterprise deals. The free tier is generous, but team features sit behind paid plans that run roughly $14–$19 per user per month depending on billing.
Insomnia: Caught in the Middle
Insomnia’s core experience is genuinely pleasant. It’s fast, the interface is cleaner than Postman’s, and its GraphQL support—schema introspection, query autocomplete—remains excellent. The plugin ecosystem adds useful flexibility.
The problem is positioning. Insomnia now costs $12 per user per month for the Individual plan and $24 for Team, and it no longer has a clear identity: heavier than Bruno, less capable than Postman, and tied to Kong’s commercial strategy. The 2023 decision to require accounts for local collections damaged trust among exactly the developers who liked Insomnia for being lightweight. Kong has since softened some of those requirements, but the episode pushed a meaningful number of users toward alternatives.
That said, if you’re already in the Kong ecosystem, or you live in GraphQL all day, Insomnia is a reasonable choice. It just isn’t the obvious one anymore.
Performance and Resource Use
All three are Electron-based, so none is truly lightweight—each will consume a few hundred megabytes of RAM with a large workspace open. In practice, Bruno tends to feel snappier because it isn’t maintaining cloud sync connections or loading a plugin runtime by default. Insomnia is generally faster than Postman on cold start.
If resource usage is a hard constraint, the honest answer is that none of these is the right tool—you’d want something like curl, HTTPie, or a native client. But among the three, Bruno has the smallest footprint.
Pricing Compared (2025)
| Tool | Free Tier | Paid Plans |
|---|---|---|
| Postman | Yes, generous for individuals | ~$14–$19/user/month for teams |
| Insomnia | Yes, with account required | $12/user/month (Individual), $24 (Team) |
| Bruno | Fully free and open source | Paid team plans available, optional |
Bruno’s paid tier exists to support the company, but the core client is free and always will be under the MIT license. That’s a meaningful difference from “free tier” pricing models.
So Which Should You Pick?
There’s no universal winner, but the decision tree is fairly clean:
Choose Postman if you need monitoring, mock servers, hosted documentation, or organization-wide governance. It’s the safest choice for large teams and the one most hiring managers already know.
Choose Insomnia if you’re deep in GraphQL, already use Kong, or want something lighter than Postman and don’t mind the account requirement.
Choose Bruno if you want your API collections versioned alongside your code, you value offline-first operation and open-source licensing, and your team is comfortable with Git-based collaboration. It’s the best fit for individual developers and small-to-mid teams in 2025.
Many developers run two: Postman for the heavy platform features, Bruno or Insomnia for daily work. That’s not indecision—it’s just matching tools to jobs.
The Takeaway
The API client market finally has real competition again, and the shift is toward local-first, Git-native workflows. Postman is still the most capable platform, Insomnia is a solid middle option with a cloud-first catch, and Bruno has earned its place by betting that developers want their API collections treated like code. If you haven’t tried Bruno, spend twenty minutes exporting one Postman collection and committing it to a repo. The workflow difference is immediately obvious—and for a lot of teams, it’s the deciding factor.