I had been using Postman since the beginning of my web developer career. Back when I started using it, it was a great tool, and I never felt the need to switch to something else. I remember some terminal-oriented alternatives popping up at some point, but I develop on a desktop environment, so I didn't really had the need to lose the affordances a full graphic user interface offers.

I'm a fan of Pycharm, so I experimented a bit with its different iterations of HTTP clients, but they never clicked for me.

But — and I can't pinpoint when — I started noticing Postman was becoming more and more sluggish. It would take a looong time to startup, and it wasn't very responsive. I kept thinking "I should look for some alternative," but, you know, was never finding the time for it. Until one day, the level of enshittification crossed a red line.

We had a networking issue at work, and we couldn't reach the Internet. That was OK for the kind of work I was doing that day, as our servers were on-premise. I was churning through my tasks, and at one point I wanted to manually test some APIs. I fired up Postman expecting to load my pre-saved configurations/requests… and I was greeted with the error message that it could not connect to the Postman servers so my data could not be retrieved. Hence, I could not use it, even if I had no need to connect to the Internet.

To make it clear, I did not (purposely) use any of the "cloud" features of Postman. My current employer is very strict about keeping any data and code internally, so I don't even want a third party to have a list of our endpoints to avoid any issues. So, even if I had taken precautions, here we were, with my data being stored remotely and with an unusable tool.

That same day — as soon as Internet connectivity was back — I looked for alternatives. I knew about Insomnia, but after installing it I was greeted with a "create account" screen that made me shiver. I kept searching and eventually found Bruno.

Bruno is all the opposite of Postman. It works by storing your collections of requests locally as simple text files, so you can easily understand where the data is stored and how. Every time you create a new collection, it will ask you where you want to create the directory to contain the data files, so you can even keep things in different places if you need to. That text format also enables you to share your configurations with your team via regular source control (aka git). It's snappy, pretty, and intuitive to use if you are familiar with similar tools like Postman or Insomnia. I haven't missed a single feature from Postman.

I've been using Bruno for a few months now, and I'm not looking back.

I strongly recommend that you give it a try and also check out their documentation to see all their features.

Happy HTTPing!