Charles vs Postman

Need advice about which tool to choose? Ask the StackShare community!

Charles

139
161
+ 1
0
Postman

83.4K
70.7K
+ 1
1.8K
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Charles vs Postman: What are the differences?

What is Charles? HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy . Charles is a web proxy (HTTP Proxy / HTTP Monitor) that runs on your own computer. Your web browser (or any other Internet application) is then configured to access the Internet through Charles, and Charles is then able to record and display for you all of the data that is sent and received.

What is Postman? Only complete API development environment . Postman is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.

Charles and Postman can be categorized as "API" tools.

Some of the features offered by Charles are:

  • SSL Proxying – view SSL requests and responses in plain text
  • Bandwidth Throttling to simulate slower Internet connections including latency
  • AJAX debugging – view XML and JSON requests and responses as a tree or as text

On the other hand, Postman provides the following key features:

  • Compact layout
  • HTTP requests with file upload support
  • Formatted API responses for JSON and XML

According to the StackShare community, Postman has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1752 company stacks & 2232 developers stacks; compared to Charles, which is listed in 16 company stacks and 13 developer stacks.

Advice on Charles and Postman

From a StackShare Community member: "I just started working for a start-up and we are in desperate need of better documentation for our API. Currently our API docs is in a README.md file. We are evaluating Postman and Swagger UI. Since there are many options and I was wondering what other StackSharers would recommend?"

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Replies (3)
Jagdeep Singh

I use Postman because of the ease of team-management, using workspaces and teams, runner, collections, environment variables, test-scripts (post execution), variable management (pre and post execution), folders (inside collections, for better management of APIs), newman, easy-ci-integration (and probably a few more things that I am not able to recall right now).

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Recommends
on
Postman Postman

I recommend Postman because it's easy to use with history option. Also, it has very great features like runner, collections, test scripts runners, defining environment variables and simple exporting and importing data.

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I use Swagger UI because it's an easy tool for end-consumers to visualize and test our APIs. It focuses on that ! And it's directly embedded and delivered with the APIs. Postman 's built-in tools aren't bad, but their main focus isn't the documentation and also, they are hosted outside the project.

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Decisions about Charles and Postman

OpenAPI is an excellent tool for creating interactive and hosted documents when releasing an API to the public. We will leverage this, specifically for the public facing APIs that customers can integrate into (to automate creating projects and storing experiment data). Postman is more complicated to share with others and is not as rich for documentation.

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Stephen Fox
Artificial Intelligence Fellow · | 1 upvote · 284.9K views

Postman supports automation and organization in a way that Insomnia just doesn't. Admittedly, Insomnia makes it slightly easy to query the data that you get back (in a very MongoDB-esque query language) but Postman sets you up to develop the code that you would use in development/testing right in the editor.

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Pros of Charles
Pros of Postman
Be the first to leave a pro
  • 488
    Easy to use
  • 368
    Great tool
  • 275
    Makes developing rest api's easy peasy
  • 155
    Easy setup, looks good
  • 143
    The best api workflow out there
  • 53
    History feature
  • 53
    It's the best
  • 44
    Adds real value to my workflow
  • 42
    Great interface that magically predicts your needs
  • 34
    The best in class app
  • 11
    Can save and share script
  • 9
    Fully featured without looking cluttered
  • 7
    Collections
  • 7
    Option to run scrips
  • 7
    Global/Environment Variables
  • 6
    Dead simple and useful. Excellent
  • 6
    Shareable Collections
  • 6
    Dark theme easy on the eyes
  • 5
    Awesome customer support
  • 5
    Great integration with newman
  • 4
    Simple
  • 4
    The test script is useful
  • 4
    Documentation
  • 3
    Easy as pie
  • 3
    Saves responses
  • 3
    Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
  • 3
    This has simplified my testing significantly
  • 2
    API-network
  • 2
    I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
  • 2
    Mocking API calls with predefined response
  • 1
    Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
  • 1
    Graph
  • 1
    Postman Runner CI Integration
  • 1
    Now supports GraphQL
  • 1
    Continuous integration using newman
  • 1
    Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
  • 0
    <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>
  • 0
    Runner

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Cons of Charles
Cons of Postman
Be the first to leave a con
  • 9
    Bloated features and UI
  • 9
    Stores credentials in HTTP
  • 8
    Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
  • 7
    Poor GraphQL support
  • 5
    Expensive
  • 3
    Can't prompt for per-request variables
  • 3
    Not free after 5 users
  • 1
    Import curl
  • 1
    Import swagger
  • 1
    Support websocket

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What is Charles?

Charles is a web proxy (HTTP Proxy / HTTP Monitor) that runs on your own computer. Your web browser (or any other Internet application) is then configured to access the Internet through Charles, and Charles is then able to record and display for you all of the data that is sent and received.

What is Postman?

It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.

Need advice about which tool to choose? Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Charles?
What companies use Postman?
See which teams inside your own company are using Charles or Postman.
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What tools integrate with Charles?
What tools integrate with Postman?
No integrations found

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What are some alternatives to Charles and Postman?
Fiddler
It is a free web debugging proxy for any browser, system or platform. It helps you debug web applications by capturing network traffic between the Internet and test computers. The tool enables you to inspect incoming and outgoing data to monitor and modify requests and responses before the browser receives them.
Insomnia REST Client
Insomnia is a powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication for Mac, Window, and Linux.
RestSharp
It is probably the most popular HTTP client library for .NET. Featuring automatic serialization and deserialization, request and response type detection, variety of authentications and other useful features
OpenAPI
It is a publicly available application programming interface that provides developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application or web service.
Retrofit
Retrofit turns your HTTP API into a Java interface
See all alternatives