Item: Postman
Rating: 10
Author: Gary Davis

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Postman is used by several developers in the organization. This program is one of my primary tools in the development of web services/APIs and also in calling external web services. Prior to actually programming calls to external web services, this tool lets you try out calls passing parameters and viewing responses. Tweak as necessary, including authorization, and once satisfied, craft your software to do the same.

Pros and Cons

Issue GET and POST calls to external APIs to verify headers and responses.
Verify developed internal APIs.
Build a library collection of useful API calls to be used as needed.
The history of previous calls is easily searched to pull up calls to be modified and repeated.

It is difficult to move a folder from one collection to another.
It may be necessary to subscribe to the professional edition to get needed functionality. So far, I have been able to use the free edition to do a substantial amount of work. For example, sharing with teams with large collections would require the paid edition.
Switching from team back to individual may result in lost collections that were archived. Export the archive before you do this so you can import it. this area can be confusing.

Return on Investment

Use of the free functionality is certainly a positive ROI.
Paid functionality for teams is reasonable and depending on the applications being developed, will have a positive ROI though in my case, I have not yet moved to the paid edition.

Alternatives Considered

Other tools I have used include LINQPad which allows coding to call APIs and while not as friendly as Postman, is one of my go-to tools for development and templating. Swagger for C# APIs generates web pages that can show the required parameters for a GET/POST call and allow testing. This can be useful in generating classes for API calls and also executing the API calls but Postman is preferred for its collections, history, and functionality.

Support Rating

I did have a case recently where I had to contact support on recovering lost collections and I quickly received a response with details on how to recover (which I did, successfully). In addition, documentation and community forums were very good.

Key Insights

Do you think Postman delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Postman's feature set?

Yes

Did Postman live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Postman go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Postman again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Postman can run a series of API calls to verify your APIs are working as expected. This functionality is very flexible.

Collections of calls can be shared with teams for effective collaboration.

If your application has some sort of error in the API call, use the browser developer tool (generally F12) to view the call and response in the Network tab. Reproduce the call in Postman to reproduce the unexpected result. Fix your application and re-test with Postman. Iterate until the application behaves as it should.

Postman is my preferred tool for API and web service testing

Overall Satisfaction with Postman