Why People Actually Leave Postman
Postman is still an excellent API client, and its free plan is not stingy. The friction is architectural: the product assumes an account and a synced workspace.
Two statements from Postman's own documentation define the situation. First, "The Scratch Pad is deprecated and no longer supported" — that was the old genuinely offline mode. Second, the replacement works, but with a catch: "When you aren't signed in to Postman, you can still use the lightweight API Client to build and send requests" and "All of your work in the lightweight API Client is stored locally and isn't synced online with Postman." The limitation is what the same page says next — saving requests into collections and using environments and variables happens in a workspace, which requires signing in.
So the no-login path sends requests but will not organise them. For a developer whose API client holds the day-to-day map of a project, that is the deal-breaker, not the pricing page. The second motivation is version control: teams increasingly want request collections reviewed in pull requests like any other code, which only works if they are plain files in the repository.
What Postman's Free Plan Gives You
Worth stating accurately before replacing it. Postman's pricing page lists the free plan as 1 user, with 1,000 API monitoring requests per team per month, 10,000 Postman API calls per month, up to 5 integrations, collection recovery for 1 day, unlimited manual Flows but Automation Flows capped at 25 credits a month. Paid tiers are Solo at $9/month and Team at $19 per user per month, billed annually.
One oddity found while checking: the AI credit allowance appears as 100 on the plan card and 50 per month in the comparison table on the same page. When a vendor's own page disagrees with itself, treat the smaller number as your planning figure.
For a solo developer who is happy signing in, that free plan covers a lot. The alternatives below are for the cases where it does not fit.
The Free Alternatives
Bruno Offline by design, git-native
The most direct answer to the complaint above. Bruno is MIT-licensed, and its repository states plainly that Bruno is offline-only with no plans to add cloud sync. Collections live in a folder on your filesystem in a plain-text markup language called Bru, so you version them with git exactly like source code and review changes in a diff.
Its Open Source plan is $0; paid tiers are Pro at $6 per user per month and Ultimate at $11, billed annually. The limit to know before adopting it: on the Open Source plan the Git integration covers public repositories only — private repos are a Pro and Ultimate feature. You can still keep collections in a private repo using git yourself; it is the in-app Git UI that is gated.
Hoppscotch MIT, web, desktop or self-hosted
Also MIT-licensed, and the most flexible about where it runs: a web app, desktop builds for Windows, Linux and macOS, a PWA install and a CLI. Self-hosting is documented, which makes it the natural pick if a team wants a shared instance under its own control rather than a vendor's cloud.
Its public pricing page did not publish plan figures when checked, so the honest summary is: the open-source project is free under MIT and SSO is noted as an Enterprise edition feature. If you need specific cloud-tier limits, get them from Hoppscotch directly rather than from a comparison article — including this one.
Insomnia $0 tier, 3 users on Git Sync
Insomnia no longer labels a plan "Free" — the $0 tier is called Essentials. It includes unlimited local and cloud projects, unlimited collection runs and environments, mock server requests capped at 1,000 per month, and Git Sync projects unlimited for up to 3 users. Paid tiers are Pro at $12 per user per month billed annually and Enterprise at $45, self-serve up to 50 users. Its pricing page shows bare "$" symbols without naming the currency.
It also keeps a Scratch Pad as a local-only option for people who do not want to log in — the feature Postman retired. Three users on Git Sync is the ceiling that decides whether Essentials works for a team or just for you.
When the Answer Is a Command Line
For a lot of API work, a GUI is the wrong tool. Two free options cover it.
HTTPie CLI is licensed BSD-3-Clause per its own documentation, and gives you readable, colourised JSON output with far less syntax than the alternative. Its web and desktop apps are a separate product — the desktop build is published as a public beta, and I could not reach an official pricing page listing free-tier limits, so treat any specific numbers you read elsewhere as unverified.
curl is installed on essentially every machine, costs nothing and will outlive all of these tools. It is also the universal interchange format: nearly every API client imports a curl command, and most browsers let you copy a network request as curl. That makes it the fastest way to move a single request between tools without exporting a collection.
Whichever client you use, the surrounding chores stay the same. JSON Formatter makes a minified response readable, Base64 Encode/Decode opens up a JWT payload so you can see the claims, URL Encode/Decode fixes query strings that break on special characters, and Timestamp Converter turns the epoch values in iat and exp into dates you can reason about. Our guides to decoding Base64 and JWT payloads and URL encoding for API parameters go deeper on both.
What to Check Before You Switch
Migrating an API client is mostly painless and has four sharp edges worth knowing in advance.
Secrets become a git problem the moment collections become files. This is the one that bites teams adopting Bruno. Keeping requests in the repository is the whole point, but environment files often hold bearer tokens, API keys and staging passwords — and committing those is a real incident, not a style issue. Keep secrets in a local-only environment file excluded by .gitignore, or in your shell environment, and commit only the variable names. The same discipline applies to Hoppscotch collections exported into a repo.
Scripts do not port cleanly. Simple requests, headers, bodies and auth move between clients without drama. Pre-request and test scripts are where each tool has its own API, so a collection leaning on scripted chaining — grab a token, inject it into the next ten calls — needs rewriting rather than importing. Count how many of your requests actually depend on scripts before estimating the work.
A team migrates together or not at all. Half the team on Postman and half on Bruno means two sources of truth for the same endpoints, which is worse than either choice. Agree the move, set a date, and export once.
Export before you need to. Collections you can only read inside a vendor's cloud are collections you do not fully control. Whatever client you settle on, keep a current export somewhere you own — and if you are moving data between formats afterwards, CSV to JSON and our guide to converting JSON to CSV cover the reshaping work that usually follows.
Comparison Table
| Tool | Free Tier | Works Offline / No Account? | Paid From |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bruno | Open Source plan $0, MIT | Yes — offline-only, no cloud sync planned | $6/user/mo Pro (private git repos) |
| Hoppscotch | MIT; web, desktop, PWA, CLI, self-host | Yes, if self-hosted or desktop | Enterprise edition for SSO (no public figures) |
| Insomnia | Essentials $0 · Git Sync up to 3 users · mocks 1,000/mo | Scratch Pad is local-only, no login | $12/user/mo Pro |
| HTTPie CLI | Free, BSD-3-Clause | Yes | Web/desktop pricing not published |
| curl | Free, preinstalled almost everywhere | Yes | — |
| Postman | 1 user · 10,000 API calls/mo · 1,000 monitors/mo · 25 automation credits | Partly — no-login client cannot save to collections | $9/mo Solo · $19/user/mo Team |
Which One Should You Use?
- You want collections in git and nothing in the cloud: Bruno. MIT, offline-only by design, plain-text files you can diff. The clearest replacement for what Postman's Scratch Pad used to do.
- Your team wants one shared instance it controls: Hoppscotch, self-hosted. MIT, and it runs as web, desktop or CLI.
- You liked Postman's workflow and want a close equivalent: Insomnia Essentials at $0 — just check the 3-user Git Sync ceiling and the 1,000 monthly mock requests.
- You test a handful of endpoints a day: HTTPie CLI or curl. No GUI, no account, no quota.
- You are a solo developer who does not mind an account: stay on Postman free. Ten thousand API calls a month is plenty, and migrating costs more than it saves.
- You need private git repos inside Bruno's UI: that is the $6/user/month tier. Or keep using git on the command line and stay free.