Postman or Rest Assured which is better for API testing?

Darshit Shah
2 min readSep 8, 2024

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Choosing between Postman and RestAssured for API testing depends on several factors related to your needs and workflow. Here’s a comparison to help you decide:

Postman

Pros:

  • User-Friendly Interface: Postman offers a graphical user interface, making it easy to create, organize, and execute API requests without writing code.
  • Test Scripting: It supports JavaScript-based test scripts, which are useful for writing test cases and assertions.
  • Collaboration: Provides features like shared collections and environments, which are great for team collaboration.
  • Mock Servers: Allows you to set up mock servers to simulate API responses for testing purposes.
  • Automated Testing: This can be integrated with CI/CD pipelines using tools like Newman (Postman’s command-line tool).

Cons:

  • Limited to UI: While Postman is powerful for manual and exploratory testing, it may be less suitable for complex automated testing scenarios.
  • Performance: For large-scale test suites, running tests in Postman might be slower compared to code-based solutions.

RestAssured

Pros:

  • Code-Based: RestAssured is a Java library, which means you can write complex, programmable tests using Java. This can be powerful for integrating tests into your existing codebase and CI/CD pipelines.
  • Rich Assertions: It provides a fluent API for writing assertions, making it easier to create comprehensive test cases.
  • Flexibility: Being code-based, it offers more flexibility for complex testing scenarios and can easily integrate with other Java testing frameworks like JUnit or TestNG.
  • Performance: Typically faster for running large-scale automated test suites compared to UI-based tools.

Cons:

  • Learning Curve: Requires familiarity with Java programming, which might be a barrier if you’re not comfortable with coding.
  • No GUI: There’s no graphical interface for interacting with APIs directly; tests are written in code and executed from your development environment.

Summary

  • Postman is great for teams or individuals who need a user-friendly interface for manual and exploratory testing, and who benefit from features like mock servers and collaboration tools.
  • RestAssured is ideal for developers who prefer to write code-based tests and integrate them into their existing development workflow or CI/CD pipeline.

If your focus is on automated, code-driven testing with complex scenarios, RestAssured might be the better choice. If you need a versatile tool for manual testing, quick setup, and team collaboration, Postman is likely more suitable.

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Darshit Shah

Hello! I’m Darshit Shah - ISTQB Certified Software QA Engineer with 13+ years of experience. I believe that by sharing our stories, we can grow together.