Postman vs Insomnia vs Bruno: Which API Client Is Best in 2025

Three years ago, picking an API client was barely a decision. Postman dominated, Insomnia offered a lighter alternative, and most teams didn’t think much past that. Then two things happened in quick succession: Postman’s 2023 update removed the Scratch Pad and pushed users toward cloud accounts, and Insomnia 8.0 arrived with a mandatory sign-in and a redesigned interface. A wave of developers started looking for the exit.

That discontent turned a small, open-source project called Bruno into a genuine contender. By 2025, the API client market has three legitimate options instead of one default. Here’s how they actually compare.

The Short Version

  • Postman remains the most feature-complete platform, especially for teams that need collaboration, mock servers, and API monitoring in one place. It’s also the heaviest and most opinionated about the cloud.
  • Insomnia has recovered from its rocky 8.0 launch and now sits in a middle ground: polished, reasonably fast, and backed by Kong. A free local mode exists again, though the pitch increasingly leans toward the paid tier.
  • Bruno is the developer’s tool: offline-first, Git-friendly, open source, and fast. It trades platform breadth for transparency and files you can read.

Which one is “best” depends almost entirely on whether you’re optimizing for a team platform or for individual developer workflow.

Postman: The Platform Play

Postman’s core strength hasn’t changed: it does more than any competitor. Collections, environments, test scripts, mock servers, monitors, documentation generation, and a public API network all live under one roof. If your organization wants a single place to design, test, and observe APIs, Postman is the most complete answer.

The 2024 relaunch of the Scratch Pad addressed the loudest complaint—you can now use Postman without an account for basic local work, though the app will nudge you toward signing in. The free tier remains generous for individuals, and paid plans start around $14 per user per month (billed annually), scaling up for enterprise features like SSO and private workspaces.

Where Postman still frustrates people:

  • Resource weight. It’s an Electron app with a large footprint, and startup time on older machines is noticeable.
  • Cloud-first defaults. Collections sync to Postman’s servers unless you deliberately keep them local. For teams with strict data policies, that’s a non-starter.
  • Pricing at scale. A 20-person team on a mid-tier plan is a real budget line, and per-seat costs climb quickly.

None of that makes Postman a bad choice. It makes it a choice with tradeoffs, which wasn’t always how it felt.

Insomnia: The Middle Path

Insomnia’s story is one of recovery. Version 8.0 in 2023 required an account and broke workflows for many long-time users, and the backlash was severe enough that the company restored a local-only mode in later releases. In 2025, Insomnia is a solid, well-designed client with strong GraphQL and gRPC support, a clean interface, and decent performance.

Kong’s ownership gives Insomnia a clear direction: it’s increasingly positioned as a companion to Kong’s API gateway and governance products. That’s good news if you’re in the Kong ecosystem and less relevant if you’re not.

The free tier covers most individual needs. Paid plans start around $5 per user per month for the Essentials tier, with higher tiers adding SSO and enterprise controls. Compared with Postman, it’s cheaper at small scale, though the feature gap widens as you move up.

The honest summary: Insomnia is a good tool that spent a year rebuilding trust. It’s a reasonable default for developers who want something more polished than Bruno but lighter than Postman, provided you’re comfortable with the account requirement for sync features.

Bruno: The Offline-First Contender

Bruno’s pitch is almost a direct rebuttal of everything people disliked about the other two. It’s open source (MIT licensed), stores collections as plain-text .bru files on your local filesystem, and requires no account, no sync, and no cloud.

That design choice has real consequences. Because collections are files, they live in your repo alongside your code. You review API changes in pull requests. You branch test suites. You diff environments. For teams already living in Git, this is a genuinely better workflow than exporting JSON from a GUI and committing it as an opaque blob.

Bruno also runs as a lightweight desktop app and offers a CLI (bru) for CI pipelines, which covers the automation gap that early versions lacked. It supports REST, GraphQL, and gRPC, includes a scriptable test runner using JavaScript, and has grown a plugin ecosystem for things like OAuth flows.

The tradeoffs are real too:

  • Fewer platform features. No hosted mock servers, no built-in monitoring, no public API network.
  • Smaller ecosystem. Documentation and community answers are thinner than Postman’s, though improving fast.
  • Team governance is DIY. Access control, shared environments, and audit trails are things you build with Git and your existing tooling rather than features you buy.

Bruno is free, with a paid “Golden Edition” for organizations that want priority support and team features. For solo developers and small teams, the free version covers nearly everything.

How They Compare on the Things That Matter

Data ownership. Bruno wins outright—your collections are files you control. Postman and Insomnia both default toward cloud sync, though both now offer local modes. If data residency matters to your organization, this is the deciding factor.

Collaboration. Postman is the strongest, with real-time editing, comments, and workspace permissions built in. Insomnia handles team sync adequately. Bruno’s collaboration model is Git, which works beautifully for engineering teams and awkwardly for anyone else.

Testing and CI. All three support automated testing. Postman’s newman CLI is mature and widely documented. Bruno’s CLI is simpler but integrates naturally with repo-based workflows. Insomnia’s testing story is the weakest of the three.

Learning curve. Insomnia and Bruno are both approachable. Postman’s depth means more to learn, but also more documentation when you get stuck.

Cost at team scale. Bruno is free. Insomnia is cheaper than Postman at small sizes. Postman’s price reflects its platform breadth—whether that’s worth it depends on how much of the platform you actually use.

So Which Should You Pick?

Choose Postman if you need a shared platform for API design, testing, mocking, and monitoring, and your organization is comfortable with cloud-hosted collections. The feature depth is unmatched, and the Scratch Pad’s return softened the biggest objection.

Choose Insomnia if you want a polished, fast client with good GraphQL support and you’re either in the Kong ecosystem or comfortable with a lighter paid tier. It’s the pragmatic middle option.

Choose Bruno if you’re a developer or small team that lives in Git, values data ownership, and doesn’t need hosted platform features. The offline-first, file-based model is a genuine workflow improvement, not just a philosophical stance.

The Takeaway

The API client market in 2025 is healthier than it’s been in years, and that’s mostly because Bruno forced the incumbents to reckon with what developers actually wanted: local control, reasonable pricing, and tools that respect their workflows. Postman is still the platform, Insomnia is the compromise, and Bruno is the specialist. Pick based on whether your bottleneck is collaboration infrastructure or developer friction—and don’t assume the biggest tool is the right one for your team.