REST Assured vs Insomnia

Free and open source

From $12 per user/month (indicative)

Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.

Free for solo use; paid tiers add collaboration, cloud sync and enterprise controls.

Everything, self-hosted

Free plan for individuals with local storage.

Widely used

OSS community · since 2010

Widely used

Kong · since 2016

• API tests live in the codebase, versioned and reviewed with the service.
• Readable given/when/then chains that map directly onto HTTP semantics.
• Full access to Java for setup, data and assertions.

• Noticeably faster and lighter than Postman for everyday request work.
• Best-in-class GraphQL and gRPC ergonomics.
• Design-first OpenAPI workflow with linting built in.

• Java only, and requires developers rather than manual testers.
• No GUI, so exploratory request work needs a separate client.
• Verbose for very large payload assertions.

• A forced-account change in 2023 damaged trust; check the current model before standardising on it.
• Test scripting is less capable than Postman's.
• Smaller ecosystem of shared collections.

JVM teams that want API tests in the same repository as the service.

Developers who mainly want a fast client with excellent GraphQL support.