A ArchDevTools
// Development Tools

Postman

API design, testing, and documentation platform used across most engineering orgs.

Proprietary apitesting
Pricing

Free tier, paid from $14/user/month.

Postman has become the default for designing, testing, and documenting APIs — the free tier alone covers most small-team needs before paid collaboration features become worth it.

Key features

  • Mock servers and auto-generated docs from collections
  • Shared team workspaces and collection versioning
  • Contract testing against OpenAPI specs
  • Huge existing library of public API collections

Self-hosted vs. cloud

SaaS, with a resource-heavy desktop client as the primary interface. No self-hosted option for most collaboration features.

Quick start

# No CLI setup — download the desktop app or use the web client at postman.com

Alternatives

Kong Gateway solves a different, adjacent problem — API traffic management in production rather than design/testing.