Postman vs. Selenium

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
Selenium
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Selenium is open source software for browser automation, primarily used for functional, load, or performance testing of applications.N/A
Pricing
PostmanSelenium
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
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PostmanSelenium
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
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
PostmanSelenium
Considered Both Products
Postman
Chose Postman
Cheaper than Smartbear products.
Chose Postman
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.
Chose Postman
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 …
Selenium
Chose Selenium
Selenium is way better than those two as it's free and has great community support.
Chose Selenium
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 …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
PostmanSelenium
API Management
Comparison of API Management features of Product A and Product B
Postman
8.3
35 Ratings
2% above category average
Selenium
-
Ratings
API access control9.532 Ratings00 Ratings
Rate limits and usage policies7.218 Ratings00 Ratings
API usage data8.117 Ratings00 Ratings
API user onboarding8.321 Ratings00 Ratings
API versioning8.624 Ratings00 Ratings
Usage billing and payments7.712 Ratings00 Ratings
API monitoring and logging8.832 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
PostmanSelenium
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
BrowserStack
BrowserStack
Score 8.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
ReadyAPI
ReadyAPI
Score 8.1 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
ignio AIOps
ignio AIOps
Score 8.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
PostmanSelenium
Likelihood to Recommend
9.7
(39 ratings)
9.2
(55 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.2
(6 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(3 ratings)
8.8
(6 ratings)
Support Rating
7.1
(11 ratings)
8.3
(11 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
PostmanSelenium
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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Open Source
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.
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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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Open Source
  • For any web based UI automation, Selenium is the best tool out there to automate your tests.
  • It supports multiple coding languages like Java, Python, Ruby, C# etc.. to choose from.
  • There is a huge community of users and can get many answers on StackOverFlow.
  • It has lot of other plugins to make your tests even more efficient.
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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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Open Source
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Postman
No answers on this topic
Open Source
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.
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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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Open Source
As I mentioned earlier, the reason I use Selenium is because there is a fairly widespread community of users, and user support services are at a good level. because the application is open source, it works on many platforms (Windows, Linux, IOS) without any problems. In addition, it gives us a lot of options for writing functional tests. For errors that we receive through the application, we can easily find the reasons for errors in the forums.
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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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Open Source
Selenium does not have technical support available easily. You have to go through forums to get the information you need. However, there are excellent forums out there that make it easy to troubleshoot. The open-source flexibility makes it difficult to have dedicated support.
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Implementation Rating
Postman
No answers on this topic
Open Source
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.
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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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Open Source
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.
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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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Open Source
  • There hasn’t been a downside to using it yet other than we’ve got to update the programs we create for each change.
  • This has saved us hundreds of hours of manpower by allowing our automation engineer to rapid fire tests.
  • We are able to screenshot and save entire sites before and after launch with a program the automation engineer created
  • We can compare large volumes of data against data in excel docs with a program created using Selenium
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.