The best Postman alternatives in 2026

Postman used to be the obvious answer for testing an API. It is still capable, but three changes pushed a lot of developers to look elsewhere:

• 2023: Postman retired Scratch Pad, its offline mode. Collections and environments now need you to sign in, and your work syncs to Postman's cloud.
• October 2025: an AWS outage took Postman down, and many people found out that the client they thought ran on their own machine stopped working with it. The Hacker News thread about it filled up with recommendations for other tools.
• March 2026: the free plan went from three users to one. Any team now needs a paid plan, at $19 per user per month billed yearly.

If any of that bothers you, the good news is that the alternatives have caught up. Here are the ones we would pick, all actively maintained in late 2026.

The short answer

• Yaak if you want the most polished app and your requests stored as plain files in Git.
• Bruno if you want a free, open source client that never touches a cloud.
• Hoppscotch if you want something that runs in the browser with nothing to install.

Yaak: the most polished desktop client

Yaak is made by Gregory Schier, who created Insomnia before selling it in 2019. It is bootstrapped, built in Rust with Tauri, and runs on macOS, Windows and Linux. The source code is MIT licensed.

What sets it apart is how little it asks of you. There is no account and no telemetry. Every request, folder and environment is saved as its own YAML file, and a built-in Git panel lets you branch, commit and review diffs without leaving the app. Secrets can be encrypted with keys kept in your system keychain, so they never land in the repository in clear text.

It speaks HTTP, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSockets and server-sent events, and it imports collections from Postman, Insomnia, Bruno, OpenAPI files and curl commands. Request chaining lets one call reuse values from another.

Pricing: free for personal use. Work use needs a license: $79 a year (which keeps a perpetual fallback license if you stop paying) or $399 for life, with a 30-day trial and no signup.

Watch out: Yaak favors chaining over scripts, so if your team relies on pre-request and test scripts written in JavaScript, check that it covers your cases first.

Bruno: open source, offline, Git-native

Bruno was built around one promise: it is offline-only, and the team has said it will never add cloud sync. Collections are plain text files that live in your repository next to the code they test, so changes to an API request get reviewed in the same pull request as the code. Since version 3.0 in January 2026, Bruno can also store requests as YAML, and both formats can sit in one collection.

It covers REST, GraphQL and gRPC, with JavaScript scripting and tests, an unlimited collection runner, a command line tool for CI and, since August 2026, a mock server. It is MIT licensed, runs on Mac, Windows and Linux, and its 2024 launch on Hacker News drew more than 1,500 upvotes.

Pricing: the open source edition is free with no account. Paid plans cost $6 or $11 per user per month billed yearly and add private Git providers and data-driven tests.

Watch out: Bruno once sold a one-time license, then moved to subscriptions, which some users did not like. The free edition is still complete enough for most solo developers.

Hoppscotch: nothing to install

Hoppscotch started as a web app and still shines there: open the site and send a request. It also has a desktop app, a command line tool and a Docker image if you want to host it yourself. It is MIT licensed and has more than 80,000 stars on GitHub.

It handles HTTP, GraphQL, WebSockets, server-sent events, Socket.IO and MQTT, and the free plan includes pre-request scripts, tests and a collection runner. You can use it without logging in: your data stays in the browser or the desktop app until you choose to sync it.

Pricing: free, and free to self-host. Cloud plans for teams cost $6 or $11 per user per month billed yearly.

Watch out: Hoppscotch does not save requests as plain files you can commit, and it is a venture-backed open core company, so some features are reserved for paid plans.

What about Insomnia?

Insomnia, now owned by Kong, is still maintained and has a free plan with Git sync for up to three users. But its 2023 update made login mandatory for most features, and that broke the trust of many long-time users. If an account-free tool is what you are after, the three above are better fits.

How they compare

	Yaak	Bruno	Hoppscotch
Account needed	No	No	No
Requests as files in Git	Yes (YAML)	Yes (.bru or YAML)	No
Runs in the browser	No	No	Yes
Scripting and tests	Request chaining	JavaScript	JavaScript
Open source	Yes (MIT)	Yes (MIT)	Yes (MIT)
Price for work use	$79 a year	Free, or from $6 a user a month	Free, or from $6 a user a month

Prices as of November 2026.

Moving your collections

All three import Postman collections, so you can try one without rewriting anything. Export your collection from Postman as JSON, import it, and run a few requests you know well before you switch for good. If you use environments, export those too: variables usually carry over, but secrets may need to be entered again.

Which one we would pick

For most developers working on a codebase, keeping API requests in the same repository as the code is the real upgrade over Postman. Bruno does that for free; Yaak does it with more polish and a license for work. Pick Hoppscotch when you want zero setup or a shared, self-hosted instance for a team.

Looking for more tools like these? Browse the developer tools on TasteDir, every one reviewed by hand.