Step CI 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.

Emerging

Step CI · since 2022

Widely used

Kong · since 2016

• YAML workflows are easy to review in a pull request and need no runtime knowledge.
• Generates a starting suite from an OpenAPI spec.
• Includes basic load-testing capability in the same file format.

• 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.

• YAML hits a ceiling on complex conditional logic.
• Small project with limited community support.
• Ecosystem and reporting are thin compared to established tools.

• 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.

Small teams wanting declarative, repo-versioned API checks in CI.

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