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 8.7 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
Considered Both Products
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
It has free community version which make it to use vastly and no budget needed. Good UI to work on and Add-on we can use add and use what ever we need. The extensions that helps to use it.
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio
Much superior integrations, better UI, and overall development experience. Debugging and testing in other tools was a frustrating experience, but proved much more satisfying in 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, …
Features
PostmanMicrosoft Visual Studio
API Management
Comparison of API Management features of Product A and Product B
Postman
7.8
39 Ratings
8% below category average
Microsoft Visual Studio
-
Ratings
API access control8.636 Ratings00 Ratings
Rate limits and usage policies7.118 Ratings00 Ratings
API usage data8.117 Ratings00 Ratings
API user onboarding8.321 Ratings00 Ratings
API versioning7.928 Ratings00 Ratings
Usage billing and payments7.715 Ratings00 Ratings
API monitoring and logging6.835 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
PostmanMicrosoft Visual Studio
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.8 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.8 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.8 out of 10
PyCharm
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
PostmanMicrosoft Visual Studio
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(43 ratings)
9.0
(105 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(7 ratings)
10.0
(2 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 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.
Read full review
Microsoft
When working with base C# code for desktop and web projects, then Microsoft Visual Studio is ideal as it provides the libraries and interfaces needed to quickly create, test and deploy solutions. It is when slightly more complex scenarios are required that issues can arise. The built-in integration for things like PowerBI Paginated Reports and dashboards is far from ideal.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • I like how the tabs and panels are organized; everything is gathered together so you can find what you're looking for quickly.
  • If you can't find something, there's a thorough search engine that searches all of Visual Studio's features.
  • The Team Foundation Server feature is fantastic since it allows us to easily deploy and roll back changes on the server.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Would be great if there was a better way to save and restore open tabs.
  • The built-in test runner can be improved, for example, by adding the ability to save a set of commonly run tests, etc.
  • Better integration for Microsoft SQL server would be great.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Usability
Postman
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.
Read full review
Microsoft
I love the overall usability of Microsoft Visual Studio. I’ve been using this IDE for more than 20 years, and I’ve seen it evolve by leaps and bounds. Today, with AI and code-suggestion/completion features, developers no longer need to remember countless libraries, methods, or language syntax, or invest a huge amount of programming effort to complete a project. It truly offers everything a developer needs to program, debug, test, and deploy in a single IDE.
Read full review
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
Read full review
Microsoft
There are many resources available supporting Visual Studio IDE. Microsoft whitepapers, forum posts, and online Visual Studio documentation. There are countless demonstration videos available, as well. If users are having issues, they can call Microsoft Support, but depending on the company's agreement with Microsoft, the number of included support calls will vary from organization to organization. I've found that Microsoft support calls can be hit or miss depending on who you get, but they can usually get you with the right support person for your issue.
Read full review
In-Person Training
Postman
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
IT is very complicated to understand all the functions that the environment has if you are not familiar with this type of development environments. It is important to select a good in-person training to achieve to understand all the possibilities and the capacity of the application. In this case, you will be able to develop a lot type of different applications.
Read full review
Online Training
Postman
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
If you are not accustomed to develop in this type of development environments it would be complicated to follow all the parts of the course because if the course does not include a great tour with all the concepts to develop you will not have the option to understand all the functions.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Using the integration between Visual Studio and our source control service, the cost of re-work and losing code is drastically reduced.
  • Paid versions of Visual Studio enable developers to be so much more productive than hacked-together open source solutions that it's hard to imagine developing in Windows without it.
  • When combined with support subscriptions and the vast array of free online help options available, Visual Studio saves our developers time by keeping them coding and testing, not wasting their time trying to guess their way out of problems or spend endless hours online hoping to find answers.
Read full review
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.