I’ve used Postman since it was a simple little Chrome extension for firing off requests. It’s grown into a whole platform since, and honestly for a lot of what I do day to day it now feels heavier than the job needs. Accounts, workspaces, sync, features I never touch, and the automation side always felt bolted on rather than built in.

For manual exploration it’s still fine. But for the automated, run-in-CI side of API testing I’ve been looking at lighter and more automation-first options.

Went through this comparison of postman alternative tools that breaks them down by use case, which matched my sense that the manual-first and automation-first tools are really aimed at different jobs.

For anyone who’s switched: what are you using now, and for which part of the workflow? Did you replace Postman entirely or just move the automated tests elsewhere and keep it around for poking at endpoints by hand?