Postman vs. Microsoft Visual Studio

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Postman
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Postman, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their flagship API development and management free to small teams and independent developers. Higher tiers (Postman Pro and Postman Enterprise) support API management, as well as team collaboration, extended support and other advanced features.
$0
Visual Studio
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Visual Studio (now in the 2022 edition) is a 64-bit IDE that makes it easier to work with bigger projects and complex workloads, boasting a fluid and responsive experience for users. The IDE features IntelliCode, its automatic code completion tools that understand code context and that can complete up to a whole line at once to drive accurate and confident coding.
$45
per month
Pricing
PostmanMicrosoft Visual Studio
Editions & Modules
Postman Free Plan
$0.00 US Dollars
Postman Basic Plan
$12 US Dollars
per month per user
Postman Professional Plan
$29 US Dollars
per month per user
Postman Enterprise Plan
$99 US Dollars
per month per user
Professional
$45.00
per month
Enterprise
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PostmanVisual Studio
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details1. Postman Free plan: Start designing, developing, and testing APIs at no cost for teams of up to three people. 2. Postman Basic plan: Collaborate with your team to design, develop, and test APIs faster; $12/month per user, billed annually 3. Postman Professional plan: Centrally manage the entire API workflow; $29/month per user, billed annually 4. Postman Enterprise plan: Securely manage, organize, and accelerate API-first development at scale; $99/month per user, billed annually
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
PostmanMicrosoft Visual Studio
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Postman
Chose Postman
ReadyAPI is a nightmare for source control integration but gives you a huge plethora more tools to create automated tests for APIs. With Visual Studio you can use a unit test framework to create test cases that can instantiate a WebClient class and make API calls. It takes …
Visual Studio
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Some of the editors are suitable for a particular programming language . For example PyCharm is suited for Python .
Visual Studio has support for many languages and Visual Studio is comparatively light weight from most of the IDE . The ability to get extensions and use them is …
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Visual Studio Code is a very nice lightweight IDE (if you can call it that), that can be used at types of business (small to large). However, since you have to trust the sources of your plugins it can be a little more nerve-wracking at larger businesses to use this tool. Also, …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
PostmanMicrosoft Visual Studio
API Management
Comparison of API Management features of Product A and Product B
Postman
8.4
35 Ratings
3% above category average
Microsoft Visual Studio
-
Ratings
API access control9.532 Ratings00 Ratings
Rate limits and usage policies7.118 Ratings00 Ratings
API usage data8.117 Ratings00 Ratings
API user onboarding8.321 Ratings00 Ratings
API versioning8.724 Ratings00 Ratings
Usage billing and payments7.912 Ratings00 Ratings
API monitoring and logging8.832 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
PostmanMicrosoft Visual Studio
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
PostmanMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
9.8
(39 ratings)
9.3
(104 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(3 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
7.1
(11 ratings)
8.8
(15 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
PostmanMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
Postman
Postman is very good for easy entry into testing. Thanks to snippets it is easy to use, but also provides a lot [of] possibilities for testing thanks to the in-line editor. Easy to use on multiple environments (versioning) thanks to sets of environment variables. The Collections view can get very full with time and it is not possible to reuse or link requests so that they have always been copied and maintained manually for each copy if changes have to be applied.
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Microsoft
It's useful for app development, debugging, and testing. I've been using it for two years and have seen it grow into a fantastic tool. All of the features, NuGet packages, and settings that enable different types of projects are fantastic. It also has a connection to Azure DevOps and Git. It's a fantastic product that's simple to use.
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Pros
Postman
  • It has opened a door for me to explore more out of it, as it is associated with so many APIs that I never felt any difficulty in finding the right API template, which are well organized and easily available.
  • It is very secure to use and provides great services which are user-friendly.
  • Due to this software I have got rid of the excessive emails and the slack channels, Now I am using my own private API and even it give me an option to produce my personal Postman’s API Builder from its Private API Network and this features has shared my excessive workload.
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Microsoft
  • Since Microsoft offers a free Community Edition of the IDE many of our new developers have used it at home or school and are very familiar with the user interface, requiring little training to move up to the paid, enterprise-friendly editions we use.
  • The online community support for Visual Studio is outstanding, as solid or better than any other commercial or open-source project software.
  • Microsoft continuously keeps the product up to date and has maintained a history of doing so. They use it internally for their own development so there is little chance it will ever fall out of favor and become unsupported.
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Cons
Postman
  • Wherever you need to automate tests that involve database verification or rely on data from databases, Postman is less suitable.
  • Postman's disc usage is extremely high, and it occasionally causes the computer to fade.
  • It doesn't have the ability to generate random data. To achieve randomness in my tests, I've been working around scripts.
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Microsoft
  • Certain settings and features can sometimes be challenging to locate. The interface isn't always intuitive.
  • Sometimes there are too many ways to do the same thing. For example, users can quickly add a new workspace in Source Control Explorer when a local path shows as "Not Mapped," but it doesn't indicate that the user might want to check the dropdown list of workspaces. The shortcut of creating a new workspace by clicking on the "Not Mapped" link can lead to developers creating too many workspaces and causing workspace management to become unwieldy. If the shortcut link were removed, the user would be forced to use the Workspace dropdown. While it can add an extra step to the process, workspaces would be managed more easily, and this would enforce consistency. At the very least, there should be a high-level administrative setting to hide the shortcut link.
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Likelihood to Renew
Postman
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
VS is the best and is required for building Microsoft applications. The quality and usefulness of the product far out-weight the licensing costs associated with it.
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Usability
Postman
I think from a non-technical perspective there are a few things that could be more clearly labeled to better understand what is being asked for or where to add certain parts of the request.
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Microsoft
The thing I like the most is Visual Studio doesn't suffer from Microsoft's over eager marketing department who feel they need to redesign the UI (think Office and windows) which forces users to loose large amounts of productivity having to learn software that they had previously known.
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Support Rating
Postman
There is a lot of in-depth documentation for Postman available online, including detailed guides with screenshots and videos. They provide example APIs for new users to explore while learning how to use the tool. Generally, bugs in the client are quickly addressed through frequent free updates. Community and professional support options are available - most of the time, the free/community level support is adequate
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Microsoft
Between online forums like StackOverflow, online documentation, MSDN forums, and the customer support options, I find it very easy to get support for Visual Studio IDE when I need it. If desired, one can also download the MSDN documentation about the IDE and have it readily available for any support needs.
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Alternatives Considered
Postman
Previous to using Postman, I would either use browser tools directly, or write an in-house tool to send requests. Postman eliminates that need while providing a much better experience and more features. At the base level, Postman is as simple as typing in the address as you would in a browser. Authentication can be provided simply as well.
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Microsoft
I personally feel Visual Studio IDE has [a] better interface and [is more] user friendly than other IDEs. It has better code maintainability and intellisense. Its inbuilt team foundation server help coders to check on their code then and go. Better nugget package management, quality testing and gives features to extract TRX file as result of testing which includes all the summary of each test case.
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Return on Investment
Postman
  • Postman is free (although there's a paid tier that offers more features) so using it for testing APIs comes with little to no risk (besides learning curve).
  • The learning curve is a little steep for non-developer users, but developers should find it easy to pick up and use right out of the box, so to speak.
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Microsoft
  • We've had hundreds of hours saved by the rapid development that Visual Studio provides.
  • We've lost some time in the Xamarin updates. However, being cross platform, we ultimately saved tons of time not having to create separate apps for iOS and Android.
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ScreenShots

Postman Screenshots

Screenshot of API design - You can design your API specifications in Postman using OpenAPI, RAML, GraphQL, or SOAP formats. Postman’s schema editor makes it easy to work with specification files of any size, & it validates specifications with a built-in linting engine.Screenshot of API documentation - Postman automatically generates documentation & supports markdown-enabled and machine-readable documentation. Docs automatically include request details & sample code. Share the docs with your team, in a public workspace, or in a dedicated portal.Screenshot of API testing - Build and run functional, integration, & regression tests directly in Postman or as part of your CI/CD pipeline with Newman (Postman’s a command-line Collection Runner that enables you to run & test a collection from the command line).Screenshot of Public workspaces - Public workspaces allow you to share your APIs publicly with anyone. You can use public workspaces to gather feedback on your APIs, onboard developers quickly, or just showcase your work.Screenshot of Reporting - Postman generates reports that enable you to visualize data for team metrics and usage, & for API activities such as creation, collection execution, and test runs. Use reports to get insights on performance, troubleshooting, & SLA adherence.