Quick and interactive way to get set up with APIs
December 16, 2024
Quick and interactive way to get set up with APIs
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Postman
Postman helps us not only use APIs, but to save setups, workspaces, preferences, etc. This means we can adopt 'personas' when interacting with an API to test various use cases where certain permissions or roles are being used. Being able to share these workspaces and templates means people can publish and pull a standard setup for each type of API we work with.
Pros
- Postman allows you to create unique workspaces = This means you can have one workspace for one vendor (E.g. GoogleMaps, Atlassian Marketplace etc.) or you can set up your workspace to be agnostic of vendor and instead use it as a 'persona' E.g. a local terminal, a service account on Airflow etc.
- Sharing setups - Being able to share workspaces, settings, credentials, API calls and more means we can set up templates and distribute them to developers easily. It also means vendors can provide Postman templates to help get its users started.
- Showing the API code that's generated - Postman is good at bringing a UI to what is essentially a terminal or code based set of instructions. Though this can mask what's actually going on behind the hood, there's an option to see what's actually being generated and cURL'd.
- Visualise AI - Visualising the response of an API can be hard at times, however the integrated AI feature can help display the response in a table or graph. The table feature is particularly helpful for looking at non structured data in a structured way.
Cons
- Postman can hide too much - Though the UI makes it easier to interact with APIs, it can sometimes what's happening behind the scenes. You can see what its' cURL'ing in some cases. But for some setups this isn't always enough.
- Varying levels of settings and parameters - Postman is very customisable in terms of setting the scope of variables and credentials. This is very powerful, but can ultimately make it quite hard to see everything you need in one place. There are some times where a credential is being used or a variable is being grabbed from somewhere and I have no idea where it's coming from.
- Postman nomenclature - Due to its complexity and customisability Postman uses a lot of its own nomenclature and naming conventions. Workspaces, environments, collections etc. It can be a bit overwhelming at the start and navigating the different layers with the new names to understand can mean getting set up can be slow.
- Easy onboarding to APIs - Getting setup with new APis is quicker with Postman once you've set up your environment/workspace. it doesn't take too much time to set things up, test your connection and review responses. This allowed newcomers to get setup and using new APIs within an hour of onboarding.
- Sharing of API's and early access - When working with a vendor around some development work, they were able to share with me their Postman workspace file allowing me to explore all of their new methods and review documentation all within Postman. This made it very easy to explore the new API. This early access API unblocked several key objectives for my team and within a few days we were already building solutions and testing them with Postman.
- Less exposure of secrets in repo commits - Being able to store and fetch your secrets in Postman has meant that we've not seen a single secret/token exposure by accidental commit to a remote repo.
Do you think Postman delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with Postman's feature set?
Yes
Did Postman live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Postman go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Postman again?
Yes
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