Step CI vs Postman

Free and open source

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

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

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

Everything, self-hosted

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

Emerging

Step CI · since 2022

Category standard

Postman, Inc. · since 2012

• 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.

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

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