Postman vs Insomnia vs Bruno: Choosing an API Client in 2026

Postman vs Insomnia vs Bruno at a Glance

Sources: each vendor's pricing pages and docs, and the GitHub API, checked October 10, 2026. Current prices are on each vendor's pricing page.

Is Postman Still Free?

Yes, for one person. Since the March 2026 plan change, Postman's plans page puts Free at a single user with no team, down from up to three users before. The same change made collection runs and mock server usage unlimited on all plans.

• Free - one user, no team. Postman's pricing page lists unlimited collection runs, mock servers, 50 AI credits, 1,000 monitoring requests and 10,000 Postman API calls a month.
• Solo - a new single-user paid plan with more AI credits and automation.
• Team - replaces the old Basic plan; collaboration starts here.
• Enterprise - priced through sales.

If you've seen a "25 collection runs a month" limit, that was the Free limit under the old plans (an archived October 2025 copy of Postman's pricing page shows it).

Offline Use and Where Collections Live

Offline use became a sticking point in September 2023, when Postman retired its offline Scratch Pad and Insomnia 8.0 briefly dropped local-only projects.

Postman

• Postman's docs say Scratch Pad is "no longer available in Postman v10.18 and later", and Postman's blog dates the change to its September 15, 2023 release.
• Its replacement, the lightweight API Client, works signed out and keeps your work local: you can send HTTP, WebSocket, Socket.IO, GraphQL, gRPC and MQTT requests, see your history, and run post-response scripts and visualizations. Collections, environments and collaboration need a signed-in workspace.
• Postman 12 adds Native Git (Postman 12.0.1 release notes, March 1, 2026): Collection 3.0 YAML collections (one *.request.yaml per request), *.environment.yaml environments and API specs live in your repo and sync to Postman Cloud only when you choose.

Insomnia

• Insomnia 8.0 (September 2023) removed local-only projects, though Scratch Pad stayed local. After a strong community backlash, Kong restored them as Local Vault in 8.3 on October 16, 2023, per Kong's GitHub announcement.
• Kong's storage docs list four modes: Scratch Pad (no login), Local Vault, Git Sync to any Git repo "without going through the cloud" (Insomnia's README), and Cloud Sync with optional end-to-end encryption.

Bruno

• Bruno's README says: "Bruno is offline-only. There are no plans to add cloud-sync to Bruno, ever."
• Each request is a plain-text file in your repo that goes through normal pull requests. Per Bruno's docs, new collections default to OpenCollection YAML since v3.1, and .bru files still work.

Protocol Support

• Postman - HTTP/REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket, Socket.IO, MQTT, SOAP, MCP requests, AI requests, Unix sockets and named pipes, per its protocols page. It also consumes server-sent events in ordinary HTTP requests, a feature Postman announced for v10.10 in February 2023, though SSE has no entry of its own on the protocols page.
• Insomnia - REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket, Socket.IO, SSE (a dedicated Event Stream request type), SOAP, and an MCP client since Insomnia 12, per its changelog.
• Bruno - REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket and SOAP, plus SSE in REST requests, which its Collection Runner and CLI skip, so you test them from the request tab. MQTT and Socket.IO exist only as open feature requests on Bruno's GitHub.

Scripting and Automated Tests

All three run JavaScript before and after a request and support assertions. If you're still deciding what to assert, start with the types of API testing.

• Postman - the pm.* API (pm.test, pm.expect, pm.environment), covered in this guide to Postman API testing. It's the most widely documented of the three: Stack Overflow had 12,555 postman-tagged questions on October 10, 2026, against 225 for insomnia and 35 for bruno (Stack Exchange API).
• Insomnia - pre-request and after-response scripts with insomnia.test() and insomnia.expect(), plus require() access to chai, lodash, uuid, crypto-js and postman-collection. Kong's scripting docs say scripts exported from Postman v2.0 and v2.1 "should also work when imported into Insomnia", except that insomnia.globals and deprecated interfaces such as postman.setEnvironmentVariable aren't supported yet.
• Bruno - req, res and bru.* (bru.setVar, bru.sendRequest), with test() and Chai's expect(). Per Bruno's JavaScript reference, since v4 script changes to environment, global and collection variables persist to disk by default; bru.setVar runtime variables stay in memory.

CLIs for CI Pipelines

The CLIs differ most in report formats and in the collection formats they can run.

Sources: Postman, Kong and Bruno CLI docs, checked October 10, 2026.

If your pipeline runs on Newman, plan the move to the Postman CLI before adopting Postman 12's YAML collections. Postman's Newman docs say "Newman is no longer maintained" and that it can't run the v3 format Native Git uses.

Team Collaboration

• Postman - shared cloud workspaces with comments, roles and history. Its pricing page limits Free and Solo to single-user workspaces, so collaboration needs Team or Enterprise.
• Insomnia - on the free Essentials plan, Kong's storage docs let an organization choose Git Sync for up to three users, or turn Git Sync off and add unlimited users, who then share projects through Cloud Sync. Cloud Sync is encrypted at rest and in transit, with optional end-to-end encryption that is off by default for Essentials accounts created since June 4, 2024 (Kong's accounts docs), and Kong stores that data in Google Cloud's US Central region. Per Insomnia's pricing page, Pro adds RBAC, and Enterprise adds SSO (SAML/OIDC), SCIM and Enterprise RBAC.
• Bruno - collaboration is Git: pull requests, reviews and branches. Bruno's pricing page shows the free plan covering public Git providers and two workspaces; Pro adds private Git providers and unlimited workspaces, and Ultimate adds SSO, SCIM and audit logs.

On annual billing, Bruno Pro has the lowest per-user price of the three entry-level team plans and Postman Team the highest, with Insomnia Pro in between; the pricing pages linked above carry the current figures.

Is Bruno Safer Than Postman?

In one specific way, yes: Bruno has no cloud workspaces, so a collection can't be exposed through a public one.

That was the exposure CloudSEK reported in December 2024: more than 30,000 publicly accessible Postman workspaces were disclosing sensitive information.

In most instances, the exposed collections included access tokens, refresh tokens and third-party API keys. CloudSEK named improper access controls, accidental sharing and plaintext storage as major contributors.

Files in a Git repo can still leak, though, so whichever tool you use:

• Keep secrets in environment variables or a secrets manager, never in the collection itself.
• Turn on secret scanning in your Git host.

Note: To run release-gating API checks on TestMu AI, paste a cURL command into a KaneAI web test: KaneAI fills in the request details, and you add the call as a step next to the UI steps that depend on it. Sign up for TestMu AI

The Same API Test in Postman, Insomnia and Bruno

One request, GET {{baseUrl}}/users/1, with two checks: the status is 200 and the response has an email. I kept both checks identical, so only the syntax changes. To run it as written, set baseUrl to https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com, a free fake API whose /users/1 returns a user with an email field.

Postman (post-response script)

pm.test("status is 200", () => {
  pm.response.to.have.status(200);
});
pm.test("user has an email", () => {
  pm.expect(pm.response.json().email).to.be.a("string");
});

Insomnia (after-response script)

insomnia.test("status is 200", () => {
  insomnia.expect(insomnia.response.code).to.eql(200);
});
insomnia.test("user has an email", () => {
  insomnia.expect(insomnia.response.json().email).to.be.a("string");
});

Bruno (the request file itself, get-user.bru)

meta {
  name: Get user
  type: http
  seq: 1
}

get {
  url: {{baseUrl}}/users/1
  body: none
  auth: none
}

tests {
  test("status is 200", function () {
    expect(res.getStatus()).to.equal(200);
  });
  test("user has an email", function () {
    expect(res.getBody().email).to.be.a("string");
  });
}

The Bruno example shows the biggest practical difference: the request and its tests are one readable text file, so a reviewer sees an assertion change in a normal Git diff. The example uses the original .bru format; in an OpenCollection YAML collection, the same request and its tests sit in one .yml file. Postman 12's YAML collections now offer something similar.

Running it in CI

# Postman (Native Git layout)
postman collection run ./postman/collections/users -e ./postman/environments/ci.environment.yaml

# Insomnia
inso run collection "Users API" --env ci

# Bruno (run from the collection root)
bru run --env ci --reporter-junit results.xml

When I ran the Bruno version on October 10, 2026, the collection folder held get-user.bru as shown above, a bruno.json file and an environments/ci.bru file that sets baseUrl to JSONPlaceholder. I invoked the CLI through npx, so nothing was installed globally. The run used Bruno CLI 4.2.1 on Node.js 25.5.0:

$ node --version
v25.5.0
$ npx -y @usebruno/cli@latest --version
4.2.1
$ npx -y @usebruno/cli@latest run --env ci --reporter-junit results.xml
get-user (200 OK) - 497 ms
Tests
   ✓ status is 200
   ✓ user has an email

📊 Execution Summary
┌───────────────┬──────────────┐
│ Metric        │    Result    │
├───────────────┼──────────────┤
│ Status        │    ✓ PASS    │
├───────────────┼──────────────┤
│ Requests      │ 1 (1 Passed) │
├───────────────┼──────────────┤
│ Tests         │     2/2      │
├───────────────┼──────────────┤
│ Assertions    │     0/0      │
├───────────────┼──────────────┤
│ Duration (ms) │     952      │
└───────────────┴──────────────┘
Wrote junit results to results.xml
$ echo $?
0

Both tests passed and the command exited with code 0. The results.xml file it wrote is a JUnit report with one test suite and the same two test cases, both marked as passed.

How to Switch From Postman to Bruno or Insomnia

Both import Postman collections, so you don't have to start over.

Bruno

• Imports Postman collections and environments, Insomnia v4 JSON and v5+ YAML, OpenAPI 2.0/3.x and WSDL, per its import docs.
• Translates common pm.* calls (pm.test, pm.environment, pm.response) to Bruno's API. A Preserve scripts option keeps them verbatim instead, but Bruno doesn't run pm.* calls, so preserved scripts must be translated before they work.
• Scripts that use the newman or postman-collection packages need rewriting.
• Importing a full Postman data export in one go is an Ultimate-plan feature.

Insomnia

• Imports Postman collections v2.0/2.1, OpenAPI 3.0/3.1, Swagger, HAR, WSDL and cURL, per Kong's import docs.
• Kong's scripting docs note that Postman's collectionVariables maps to Insomnia's base environment, so check scripts that rely on collection-level variables.
• It can't import Bruno collections.

A migration checklist

• Export each Postman collection (v2.1) and environment.
• Import into the new client and run every request once.
• Move secrets out of collections into environment variables or a secrets manager.
• Fix any scripts the importer couldn't translate: search for pm. in Bruno, or for globals and deprecated postman.* calls in Insomnia.
• Switch your CI job to the new CLI and compare one week of results side by side before retiring the Postman job.

Strengths and Trade-Offs of Each API Client

• Postman - Agent Mode adds AI-assisted debugging and test writing, and Postman's homepage says it is trusted by more than 40 million developers, the largest community of the three. The trade-off is cost: working with teammates takes a paid Team or Enterprise plan.
• Insomnia - a project's storage isn't fixed: Kong's storage docs say you can switch a project between Local Vault and Cloud Sync after creating it, so a solo project can become a shared one later. Inso CLI also lints OpenAPI specs, which suits design-first teams. The trade-off is a smaller ecosystem than Postman's: no MQTT, fewer integrations and a smaller community.
• Bruno - growing quickly: a July 2026 Business Wire release announced it had passed 4 million developers. Bruno AI (v4.0) and local mock servers (v4.1) are both in beta, per Bruno's docs. The trade-offs are a smaller community, no MQTT or MCP requests yet, and a runner and CLI that skip SSE requests.

Bruno's 2025 recap reports monthly active users rising from about 250,000 to more than 600,000 during 2025.

Other API Clients Worth a Look

• Hoppscotch - open source (MIT), browser-based and self-hostable; HTTP, WebSocket, SSE, Socket.IO, MQTT and GraphQL.
• Thunder Client - a lightweight API client for VS Code, and for JetBrains IDEs on paid plans.
• HTTPie - a popular open-source command-line HTTP client, with web and desktop apps.
• Yaak - an offline-first, Git-mirroring client for REST, GraphQL, SSE, WebSocket and gRPC. Free for personal use; a license is needed at work.

For a longer list, see more Postman alternatives, or, for tools built specifically for API testing, this roundup of API testing tools.

Running Release-Gating API Tests With TestMu AI

Postman, Insomnia and Bruno check API requests, and their CLIs run those checks in CI. When API tests and UI tests live in separate tools, the path behind a feature (a click, the API call it triggers, the screen that confirms it) is rarely tested as one flow, so a bug at that seam can pass both suites.

TestMu AI (formerly LambdaTest) runs API tests on the same platform as your web and mobile tests. Keep your developers' API client for day-to-day work and run the release-gating checks on TestMu AI: REST Assured or Karate suites run in parallel on HyperExecute from your CI pipeline, and KaneAI can turn a pasted cURL command into an API step in the same test as your UI steps.

To set it up, see API testing on TestMu AI or the REST Assured on HyperExecute guide.