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

In early 2023, Postman’s decision to retire its Scratch Pad and push users toward cloud-synced accounts triggered a quiet exodus. Developers who had used the tool for years suddenly found their local workflows tied to a login prompt. Insomnia made a similar move around the same time, requiring accounts and cloud sync for collaboration features. That friction created an opening for Bruno, an open-source client that stores collections as plain files on your filesystem—no account, no cloud, no telemetry.

Two years later, the market looks different. Postman has grown into a full API platform with governance, monitoring, and AI features. Insomnia has settled into its role under Kong’s ownership. Bruno has matured from a scrappy alternative into a legitimate daily driver for teams that care about Git-native workflows. Choosing among them in 2025 is less about which one is “best” and more about which tradeoffs fit your team.

The core philosophical split

The three tools differ on a fundamental question: where do your API collections live, and who controls them?

Postman is a cloud-first platform. Your collections sync to Postman’s servers by default, which enables collaboration, sharing, and a growing suite of platform features. Local-only work is possible, but the product’s center of gravity is clearly the cloud.

Insomnia occupies a middle ground. It supports local storage, Git sync, and cloud sync depending on your plan and configuration. Since Kong acquired it in 2019, the tool has leaned into enterprise features like SSO and RBAC while keeping a relatively lightweight desktop experience.

Bruno is offline-first and file-based by design. Collections are stored as .bru files in a folder you choose, which means they live in your Git repo alongside your code. There is no mandatory account, and the tool explicitly avoids telemetry by default.

This distinction matters more than any feature checklist, because it determines how your API collections fit into your existing engineering practices.

Postman: the platform play

Postman remains the most feature-complete option, and for many teams that breadth is the point. The free tier covers individual use with reasonable limits on collection runs and API calls. Paid plans start around $14 per user per month for the Basic tier and climb steeply for Professional and Enterprise tiers.

What you get for that money is a genuine platform. Collection runner for automated testing, mock servers, API documentation hosting, monitoring with alerts, a public API network, and increasingly sophisticated AI-assisted features for generating tests and understanding endpoints. The Postman CLI integrates with CI/CD pipelines, and the governance features in Enterprise tiers address the compliance concerns that large organizations actually have.

The tradeoffs are real, though. The desktop app has grown heavy over the years—users regularly report sluggish startup times and high memory usage on large collections. The account requirement, even for basic use, remains a sticking point for developers who work in air-gapped environments or simply prefer not to log in to write a GET request. And the pricing curve gets uncomfortable for teams that need collaboration but not enterprise governance.

Postman is the right choice if you need the platform features—particularly documentation hosting, monitoring, or the API network—or if your organization has already standardized on it and the switching cost outweighs any annoyance.

Insomnia: the middle path

Insomnia’s pitch is a polished desktop experience with flexibility on where your data lives. The interface is arguably cleaner than Postman’s, and the tool handles GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket, and REST in a single client without feeling cluttered.

The free tier is generous for individual developers. Paid plans—roughly $12 per user per month for Pro and higher for Enterprise—unlock collaboration, Git sync, and organizational features. Kong’s stewardship has brought enterprise credibility but also some feature gating that frustrates users coming from the free tier.

The 2023 account requirement controversy damaged Insomnia’s reputation among privacy-conscious developers, and while the team has since added options for local-only work, the perception lingered. The plugin ecosystem, once a major selling point, has seen less activity as the core product matured. Insomnia also went through a notable pricing restructure that left some long-time users feeling burned.

Insomnia makes sense for developers who want a refined UI and multi-protocol support without committing fully to a cloud platform, and for organizations already using Kong’s API gateway and wanting tighter integration.

Bruno: the Git-native challenger

Bruno’s design choices read like a direct response to every complaint about its competitors. Collections are plain text files in a folder structure you control. There’s no account, no sync service, and no telemetry. You commit your collections to Git, review changes in pull requests, and collaborate the same way you collaborate on code.

The tool is open source under the MIT license, with a paid “Golden Edition” that adds features like a visual Git interface and additional collaboration tooling. The free version covers essentially everything an individual developer or small team needs.

Bruno supports REST and GraphQL, with gRPC support having arrived in recent releases. The feature set is narrower than Postman’s—you won’t find hosted documentation, monitoring, or a public API network—but for teams whose workflow is already centered on Git and CI, that’s often a feature rather than a gap. The CLI integrates cleanly into pipelines, and the file-based storage means merge conflicts are resolvable text diffs rather than opaque cloud state.

The limitations are worth stating plainly. Bruno’s ecosystem is younger, so you’ll find fewer tutorials, integrations, and community resources. Enterprise features like SSO and granular RBAC are less mature. And teams accustomed to Postman’s platform conveniences may find the transition requires rebuilding some workflows.

How to decide

The decision usually comes down to three questions.

Does your organization require cloud collaboration and governance? If you need SSO, audit logs, role-based access, and hosted documentation, Postman’s Enterprise tier is the most complete answer. Insomnia competes here but with a smaller footprint.

Do you want your API collections versioned alongside your code? If your team already lives in Git and treats configuration as code, Bruno’s model will feel natural. Postman and Insomnia can both sync to Git, but neither treats the filesystem as the source of truth the way Bruno does.

How much do you value a polished, multi-protocol desktop client over platform features? Insomnia’s UI remains excellent, and its support for GraphQL, gRPC, and WebSockets in one place is a genuine strength. If you don’t need cloud collaboration, the free tier is hard to beat.

A practical pattern emerging among teams is to use more than one. Bruno for day-to-day development and collections committed to repos, Postman for shared documentation and monitoring where the platform features earn their cost. The tools aren’t mutually exclusive, and the file formats are portable enough that switching costs stay manageable.

The takeaway

There’s no universal winner in 2025, and the framing of “which one should developers use” misses that the three tools now serve genuinely different needs. Postman is the platform for teams that want collaboration, governance, and hosted API infrastructure and are willing to pay for it. Insomnia is the polished middle option for developers who want a strong desktop client with flexible storage. Bruno is the choice for teams that treat API collections as code and want their tooling to respect that.

Pick based on where your collections should live and how your team collaborates—not on feature counts. The best API client is the one that fits your workflow without asking you to change it.