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.
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Selenium
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Selenium is open source software for browser automation, primarily used for functional, load, or performance testing of applications.
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SpecFlow
Score 10.0 out of 10
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SpecFlow is an open source BDD for .NET. that aims to bridge the communication gap between domain experts and developers by binding readable behavior specifications to the underlying implementation.
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Pricing
Postman
Selenium
SpecFlow
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
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Postman
Selenium
SpecFlow
Free Trial
No
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
1. 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
I did not use SoapUI and can't compare them. But, Postman gave results my team needed, that's why we did not test any other software. Runs simple, gives instant and exact results.
Postman has pros and cons both and keeping them in mind we are using multiple tools to leverage our Services, integration, automation, and testing needs.
Some of the above mentioned tools have better automation or complete framework implementation capabilities. Having all the …
The first obvious thing is Selenium, an open-source tool, and it has a wide-open community for support. Well, on the other hand, Silk Test is a paid tool. With the combination of different tools in the market, we can build a solution for Web and Mobile based automation using …
Postman is good for organising your API credentials, vendor settings, environments etc. It's also a good way of getting stared with APIs as you get to use a GUI which can help you understand what we mean by a 'body' or 'bearer token'. I think people generally gravitate towards GUI tools for getting started in a new technology area.
When you have to test the UI and how it behaves when certain actions are performed, you need something that can automate the browsers. This is where Selenium comes to the rescue. If you have to test APIs and not the frontend (UI), I would recommend going with other libraries that support HTTP Requests. Selenium is good only when you have no choice but to run the steps on a browser.
It is best suited for implementing the automated test cases in a human readable form so it's easy for non-technical members of the team and stakeholders to understand the test cases, features and the functionalities of the application. Automation of Integration tests and End to End tests are good use case. It is less appropriate or situations where the focus is only on the writing and maintenance of unit tests.
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.
Versatility to be used in combination with different kinds of automated testing like automated performance testing, API testing, UI testing etc. I use JavaScript, Selenium, C#, email testing libraries, database testing libraries in combination with BDD with SpecFlow. I am able to use all these with SpecFlow to make my automation framework to be able to automate any kind of automated testing.
It provides different widely used runner options like NUnit, XUnit etc. Before I started to work on establishing proper test automation in my workplace, the previous automation framework (non-BDD based) as well as unit tests used NUnit runner. The transition to using BDD was smooth because we could use the same runner and there were no compatibility issues.
The auto-complete feature is good. I use it with Visual Studio as well as Rider and I don't have to recall the entire Gherkin statements. I just type a few words and the entire Gherkin statement implemented in framework is auto-suggested by SpecFlow. It saves time and context switching.
Selenium is pretty user-friendly but sometimes tests tend to flake out. I'd say roughly one out of twenty tests yields a false positive.
Selenium software cannot read images. This is a minor negative because a free plug-in is available from alternate sources.
Slowness may be a minor factor with Selenium, though this is an issue with basically any testing software since waiting on a site to execute JavaScript requires the browser to wait for a particular action.
SpecFlow does not accepts optional input variables in the methods defined during Gherkin statement implementation. Cucumber supports optional input variables in the methods defined during Gherkin statement implementation.
The tests identified while using SpecFlow with NUnit removes all white spaces in the scenario names. It makes the tests less readable. If the white spaces are not auto-removed, it would be much better for readability as well as their actual identification in the repository.
We love this product mainly because of its high customization abilities and the ease of use. Moreover, its free and can be learned easily through online communities and videos. The tests are more consistent and reliable as compared to Manual tests. It has enabled us to test a large number of features all in one go, which would have impossible through manual tests. The reports generated at the end of the tests are really helpful for the QA and the development teams to get a fair view of the application.
1. Friendly user friendly - when I started using Postman, I was a beginner to the API world, and it gave me a friendly view to begin its usage 2. Postman offers many features, including API testing, monitoring, documentation, and mock servers 3. Environment variables simplify testing across multiple environments (dev, prod) without repetitive configuration.
For those who are unfamiliar with coding, there is a bit of a learning curve. There is plenty of helpful documentation and resources but it can take a little time to get the software up and running. Once you get the hang of how Selenium works, and what it can do, you realize how many things you can use it for, and how many processes you can automate.
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
The Selenium app has a pretty fat community of users. For the problems we are experiencing, we are primarily receiving support from these communities. In addition, there is widespread service support. Instant support is given to the problems we experience when we need Online support. We and our team are happy to provide this support, especially before important deployment processes
We did everything we needed to use it. Now we can execute our tests on different operational systems and browsers running few tests simultaneously. We also implemented Appium framework to execute our tests on mobile devices, such as iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets. We use SauceLabs for our test execution and Jenkins for continuous integration.
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.
At the time of adoption, there were not many other alternatives that were even close to being competitive when it comes to browser testing. As far as I know now to this day, there is still little competition to Selenium for what it does. Any other browser-based testing still utilises Selenium to interact with the browser.
SpecFlow is .Net based which supports C#. Behave is Python based. Cucumber is Java based. Ghost Inspector is no-code based but provides very limited testing features. We wanted to implement BDD so we rued out using Ghost Inspector. Most of the developers in my team are C# experts so it was decided for everyone's comfort to go for SpecFlow rather than Behave or Cucumber. It's import to have technical experts in the language of the automation framework because there are many situations where the solutions to the test automation needs are not straightforward and implementing those requires expertise in the related programming language.
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.
Everyone stays on the same page regarding the behavior of existing functionalities whether it be technical or non-technical individuals. So there is less need for multiple people to get involved which saves time and thus money.
Reusing the same code through the implemented Gherkin statement saves test automation time and thus reduces cost.
We combine SpecFlow with other opensource testing technologies to make our automation framework more versatile which further saves costs for us.
