SoapUI / ReadyAPI vs Postman

From $829 per year (indicative, ReadyAPI Test module)

From $14 per user/month (Basic, billed annually)

ReadyAPI is licensed per module — Test, Performance, Virtualization — and buying all three multiplies the cost.

Free tier is generous for individuals. Costs come from collaborator seats and monitoring/mock-call volume, and enterprise plans jump sharply.

SoapUI open source is free and covers SOAP and REST functional testing.

Free plan for individuals and small teams with limited collection runs, mock calls and monitors.

Widely used

SmartBear · since 2005

Category standard

Postman, Inc. · since 2012

• Unmatched SOAP, WSDL and JMS support for legacy enterprise integration work.
• ReadyAPI bundles functional, security, load and virtualisation in one product family.
• Groovy scripting escape hatch for anything the GUI cannot express.

• Near-universal adoption — collections are a lingua franca between teams and vendors.
• Covers design, mocking, testing, documentation and monitoring in one place.
• Newman makes any collection runnable in CI without rewriting it.

• Dated Java desktop UI that feels heavy next to modern clients.
• Project files are XML and merge badly in version control.
• Modular licensing gets expensive fast.

• Cloud-first sync raised real concerns for teams handling sensitive API credentials; the offline story has been repeatedly reduced.
• Collections stored in the vendor cloud rather than your repo make code review and branching awkward.
• The desktop app has grown heavy, and per-seat costs add up on large teams.

Enterprises testing SOAP services, message queues and legacy integration layers.

Teams that want one tool covering the whole API lifecycle and value ecosystem ubiquity.