Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs

https://paw.cloud/client

by michaelsbradley • 9 years ago

264 117 9 years ago

paw.cloud

apearson• 9 years ago

Anyone have any experience with how this compares to Postman?

zhs• 9 years ago

significantly more buggy in my experience (this was a few months ago though)

danpalmer3• 9 years ago

I've found Paw to have much better UX than Postman. Plus it's not an Electron app which is always nice.

christotty• 9 years ago

Maybe I'm lucky, but I've used Postman quite a bit and never ran into an issue caused by it being Electron based. For that matter, my favorite code editor, VS Code, is in that same boat.

_Codemonkeyism• 9 years ago

Postman free is 1000 API calls/month if I see this correctly, above it's $8/month subscription.

I'd rather buy Paw.

Edit: Sorry, see comment. Thanks!

joshstrange2• 9 years ago

This is slightly misleading, that is only for their monitoring service. You can make (and I do) as many manual requests as you want.

Artemis2• 9 years ago

Paw is worth the money. I have been using it for two years and I really enjoy working with it. The UI/UX is lightyears ahead of everything else I have tried. I haven’t used Paw for Teams but it seems expensive, especially for existing license holders.

sanjeetsuhag• 9 years ago

Paw has better UX. Just feels better than Postman. I'll always support native apps over Electron. Electron can do die in a ditch.

andyfleming• 9 years ago

In short, I'm a big fan of PAW after spending some time with both.

Check out this thread from one of the other times it was posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12190047

InTheArena3• 9 years ago

$50? Ouch. I support developers making a living, but this is a market with a lot of competition, some of it free, some of it great, and some of it free and great.

If it were $19, the professional looking UI would have had me pull the trigger, but $50 is way on the other side of of my price sensitivity.

XVincentX• 9 years ago

I'm on the same page. I'm not totally sure it's worth the money they're asking.

eli• 9 years ago

(Offtopic, but HNers thinking of creating a startup that sells tools to developers should heed these comments.)

fny• 9 years ago

This is actually a pretty common business model among a tier of "aspirational" mac applications without a subscription model.

See panic.com and omnigroup.com for other examples.

InTheArena3• 9 years ago

Agreed, but this tool is nowhere near the completeness of OmniGraffle, OmniOutline or OmniFocus, all of which I have purchased for full price, and gladly so.

The value doesn't appear to be there for me.

chrissnell• 9 years ago

I don't use Paw (I'm a Linux-on-the-desktop user) and I have no idea who they are but a one-time $50 cost doesn't bother me if it's something that is a key tool for my job and is demonstrably better than its competitors in the market.

In other words, if it's good enough for me to spend $20 on a license, it's good enough for me to spend $50.

InTheArena3• 9 years ago

True, but does this do things better then postman? What's my migration cost? For that matter, why not just use curl?

There is of course, value, but there $50 price point I reserve for things absolutely critical, with little good competition - for Example Tower, or OmniFocus.

kitsunesoba• 9 years ago

For me, considering how this is a tool that I use many times each week and how tiny of a cost it is vs the average salary in this industry, $50 really isn’t extravagant, particularly if it means I can avoid piling on yet another subscription.

I value apps that try to be a good citizen on the macOS desktop, though, which puts Paw above Postman in my view. It’s likely that many don’t care about this aspect at all so I can see where overall value stacks up differently for others.

Philipp__• 9 years ago

Good, reliable tool, with great native UI is very well worth one time $50 purchase.

eddieroger• 9 years ago

I switched to Paw after spending many hours over several days wondering why the API I was calling was working sporadically through the client I was using at the time, Postman. $50 is nothing compared to the pay my company spent for me to realize Postman was using Chrome's settings (and more importantly, cookies and caching), and thus causing me inconsistent results. I agree $50 is steep, but Paw is well worth it, and I've been thrilled to use it ever since.

sleepyhead• 9 years ago

Seriously? You can use the app for less than hour and it will pay for itself considering the hourly rate of an average programmer. A useful professional tool that will make development flow easier and save you time and fifty bucks is expensive? $19 is peanuts. I use Paw quite often and every time I use it I discover some new little detail that the developers put in. It's not a basic app, it's well-designed and it's useful. $19 - seriously that's less than what many people spend on coffee in a week. $50 is not at all expensive for a tool that used in a professional setting on a regular basis. Far from it.

s_dev• 9 years ago

I have Paw through my SetApp bundle that I pay €9 a month for. Don't think I'd buy it as it's basically the same as Postman though maybe a little prettier.

coreyja• 9 years ago

This is my first time hearing about `SetApp` but it sounds like an interesting concept. How do you feel about it? How many apps from it so you use often/daily? Worth the $10 a month?

danpalmer3• 9 years ago

I had a trial and found the selection for developers wasn't worth the $10.

There are a few little utilities, like the Regex tester, that are definitely neat and well made, but given the once a month I actually need that functionality, I'll just use a crappy web app for it.

Most of the software I found to be the 3rd best in its category (or worse), for example, It doesn't have OmniFocus or Things, it has a bunch of to-do list apps I've never heard of that all have poor design and UX. Besides that there's a lot of the soft of system enhancer software that I thought made my computer go faster when I was younger but that I've now realised is mostly pointless.

For me to resubscribe to SetApp, I'd want to see best-in-class apps like Things, OmniFocus, SublimeText (or even BBEdit, I'm not a fan, but it's a good Mac app), RapidWeaver (again, not for me, but good for many), Transmit, Coda, Delicious Library, etc. I'd probably pay more than $10 for that sort of selection.

spdustin• 9 years ago

My daily apps from SetApp:

    ‣ HazeOver (dims any window without focus by a simply-configurable amount)
    ‣ Mosaic (window position/size management), TextSoap (quick text-cleansing recipes)
    ‣ Timing (track time spent in all apps/paths for client billing)
    ‣ Marked (Markdown editor with live preview)
    ‣ Paw

I also use:

    ‣ Gemini (dupe file finder)
    ‣ Chronicle (bill organizer)
    ‣ NetSpot (wifi analyzer)

For me, it's definitely worth it.

softinio• 9 years ago

I am for supporting other software developers and great tools but quite honestly its not worth the $$$

Have used postman for years with no issues and recently have started using this which I think is actually great especially if you have zsh and fzf for searching what you have run previously on terminal:

https://httpie.org/

asf4232• 9 years ago

Our team of ~30 mixed roll engineering types are using httpie and dig it

We collaborate in shared tmux sessions quite a bit, though, so being able to open a pane and run it for others to view is legit.

Having used Paw, it is for those that must have a UI that looks like a traditional Mac app.

Nothing more of value there.

joshstrange2• 9 years ago

This will obviously make some people think of Postman so I wanted to give my take. I, along with my team, currently use Postman (without team sync). I'd love to switch to Paw but I think we are close to getting the company to pay for team sync and I'd hate to pay $50 then have to constantly be exporting/importing into Postman<->Paw.

I'd jump on Paw for the whole team as the $10/mo for the entire team for syncing is very attractive vs Postman Pro $8/user/mo (hell, I'd pay it myself) but I am the only macOS user (the rest on linux) and while we can debate the value of electron apps all day long they do serve a purpose.

mosselman5• 9 years ago

I have a Paw license and recently I started using Insomnia instead: https://insomnia.rest/

I find Paw's project management very annoying. It assumes that I am working on some project and wants me to organise everything like that. Fine, lets do it, so where are my projects? They are hidden in some dropdown that you can have fun finding.

Insomnia is much cleaner and more to the point.

mcescalante• 9 years ago

Other reasons that I also like Insomnia (I've used Paw as well):

- Cross platform

- Simpler use for non-experts

- No need for pro (paid subscription) for my needs, so it's completely free

- Feels nicer than all of the browser "REST explorer" plugins

thsowers• 9 years ago

Agree on these points as well, also love that it's open source[0]

[0] https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia

thejosh• 9 years ago

Haven't used paw, but agreed with above about Insomnia, and:

- GraphQL support is pretty decent

- Copy as CURL is awesome

cyberferret• 9 years ago

I was on the verge of buying a licence for Paw a couple of months ago, but discovered Insomnia, and been using that instead. (Formerly used Postman before that).

To me, the functionality of Paw and Insomnia seem very similar, so the $50 licence price deterred me from purchasing Paw. If Paw was closer to the $20 mark, I might have still bought it to have in my arsenal of tools 'just in case'.

My rationale is that if there was nothing else on the market with any equivalent functionality, then $50 for Paw is a no brainer. But when there are other competitive product with equal (or greater) feature sets for free, then the pricing works against it.

_pdp_6• 9 years ago

No need for a license for https://rest.secapps.com and we have all features of Paw.

theptip2• 9 years ago

Insomnia looks nice, but by default it does not format URLs as links, so in a HATEOAS API you can't follow links.

Am I just missing a setting here? Seems like this is a fairly big omission, Postman even supports copying over your headers (e.g. auth token) when you follow a link.

gschier6• 9 years ago

Insomnia founder here. It now does format links but it opens them in your default browser instead of making a new request. That's definitely on the to-do list.

Also, if you want it sooner, Insomnia is open source so it's possible to help grow the project. I think the only other app that's open source is Advanced REST Client but it's still a Chrome app (I think).

dsgfhasgjklas• 9 years ago

What differentiates Insomnia from Postman? Both are non-native electron apps.

gschier6• 9 years ago

There are so many differences it's impossible to list them. In general, Postman focuses on having every feature under the sun (integration testing, mock APIs, etc) whereas Insomnia focuses on the core of just being an HTTP client with additional helpers to be more productive. The result being that Insomnia is not suitable for as many use cases but is has a better user experience because it's more focused. Insomnia is also open source software.

You should really try them both to figure out which one best suites you.

P.S. I'm the developer of Insomnia.

vosper• 9 years ago

I just switched to Insomnia because of a bug in Postman, where it wouldn't pick up changes in the body of an HTTP POST and would use something that had been sent previously. I was able to see that the data received by the server was previous values from the text field. If I cloned the request into a new tab it started working. It happened repeatedly - at some point after making edits to the body it would just get stuck and not send what was in the editor. So I switched because I can't use an app with such issues with its core functionality.

I also disliked Postman's UI, but it wasn't a deal broker. I'm not in love with Insomnia's UI, either, but I like Insomnia because it reliably sends the right request.

izaacz• 9 years ago

I'm using Insomnia too, just because its license.

gschier6• 9 years ago

Thanks for mentioning this! Simplicity and ease of use is exactly why I started building Insomnia. Awesome to see that others agree.

JustinBrown• 9 years ago

Really love Insomnia. Also really appreciate the account syncing available with pro.

urda• 9 years ago

I'm a longtime Paw user, but I'll be checking this out myself!

Razengan• 9 years ago

insomnia.rest

One of those moments where you kick yourself for not being able to come up with these sorts of names.

jacurtis• 9 years ago

Haha just visit this page: https://insomnia.rest/download/

"Download Insomnia so you can finally `GET` some `REST`"

I actually laughed out loud at that one.

crispinb2• 9 years ago

Just checked out Insomnia. From a first run through with a few endpoints it does seem beautifully done. I have been dismissive of electron-based apps in the past. VS.Code started to wear that down - I never took to using it because IntelliJ & emacs cover my bases, but I played with it enough to see its excellence. Now there's Insomnia. Perhaps I need to rethink my attitude to electron apps. I am uncomfortable with their size (eg. Insomnia @ 170MB), but given the quality that's clearly possible, I'm starting to distrust that discomfort.

h1d• 9 years ago

And what exactly makes you uncomfortable having 170MB sitting?

OS must be crazy for you.

max23_• 9 years ago

Agree.

Switched to using Insomnia from Postman since it was showcased in HN.

tbrock• 9 years ago

Agree whole heartedly, bought a Paw license and never use it. I use insomnia instead.

It's cross platform like postman so I can use it on my linux box and recommend it to all of our team members and it's not a pain in the ass.

Surprisingly I thought I'd place a lot of value on the native mac look and feel for this app but it really doesn't make a large difference.

enraged_camel• 9 years ago

Yeah, Paw is a great piece of software, but the fact that it's macOS-only is a very severe failing IMO. I bought a license and ended up switching to Windows a few months later due to circumstances outside my control, and now I regret having paid for Paw.

fredsted4• 9 years ago

Insomnia doesn't even come close to Paw due to the amount of features Paw has that Insomnia doesn't.

Also, Projects are just Paw files. Inside the files you can group and subgroup requests, too. Unless you meant something else?

mosselman5• 9 years ago

That might be true. For me Paw's UI doesn't help me (a simple user vs a power user) to work pleasantly. I am forced in Paw to deal with Projects, difficulty to rename requests, etc.

sa2ajj• 9 years ago

Insomnia doesn't even come close to Paw due to the amount of features Paw has that Insomnia doesn't.

Can you list some of the important for you features that Insomnia lacks? (I'm not affiliated w/ Insomnia however I'm curious what makes Paw stand out to you.)

dorian-graph• 9 years ago

For quick-and-dirty things I use cURL or httpie otherwise I use Paw (and have for about a year now). I had previously used Postman before that, but even then Paw was a better app—native app so it looked better + felt faster, nicer collections, better default shortcuts, etc.

Paw has a lot of power behind it, otherwise if you're just doing basic POST requests, stick to httpie. The code generators and extensions are nice. Easily switching between environments (e.g. dev, staging, prod). History of run requests. Tying values from other requests into other requests—e.g. get an auth token from a login request, and use that in a header in all other requests. I still only use a fairly basic amount of the features too. It's a very polished app, and the devs seem good too.

OJFord3• 9 years ago

Just to play devil's advocate: I do all of that in Postman, which for the last year or so has also been a native app - at least, in the sense of being non-Chrome, it's not using macOS UI elements. I think different environments is a recent feature too.

It's free, and cross-platform. And the team sharing capabilities are cheaper than Paw's. It's odd that Paw seems to bill its single platform nature as a feature.

There's some great FOSS alternatives too!

kiliankoe• 9 years ago

Isn't Postman's "native" app electron-based instead of being the chrome packaged app from before? So they basically went from Chrome to Chromium and started calling it native...

eradicatethots3• 9 years ago

For Mac users t is a feature, it means 100% dev focus on their platform and tight integration/up to date ness with all Mac features. It’s also obvious a problem, if they have windows users team mates or friends. It’s got pros and cons.

emmelaich• 9 years ago

You can copy a browser request as a cURL command. Both Firefox and Chrome via developer tools.

Just a cool feature I learnt recently.

eradicatethots3• 9 years ago

Seems useful. Thanks for sharing.

sbr464• 9 years ago

Any info on graphql support? I know postman and others don’t, would be nice to have a single tool.

e1g• 9 years ago

Insomnia supports GraphQL pretty well

gschier6• 9 years ago

Thanks for mentioning this. It's awesome to hear that this feature is getting real use!

dewey• 9 years ago

I use Paw almost every day and my usual workflow is:

1) Copy request as curl from the Chrome Inspector

2) Import curl command into Paw via their importer

3) Inspect request, play around with parameters etc.

That is a really great feature of Paw and saves a lot of time and is worth the money for it. I also discovered some bugs and reported them and they were usually fixed in the next release and the developer is fast and responsive about them.

lowbloodsugar• 9 years ago

I've used it for over a year and I like it. I have to debug things like SAML IdP/SP handshakes and session management for SSO in multiple environments as multiple users.

donatj• 9 years ago

I used to use Postman but never really actually liked it. It just was OK.

I found and loved Paw right up until they broke the way GET parameters work. I want to be able to edit them as part of the URL string and removing that option is obnoxious.

I still use it nearly every day, but every time I go to edit the URL and it switches to the GET param editor I cringe.

Also, I've had a PR open to fix their cURL generators escaping since June…

- https://github.com/luckymarmot/Paw-cURLCodeGenerator/pull/13

dep_b4• 9 years ago

People pass me paw files like I'm supposed to have it installed. I don't understand it. "Here's the documentation of the API". OK thanks.

michaelsbradley3• 9 years ago

Paw can do a reasonably good job of exporting an OpenAPI (Swagger) 2.0 description of the API, but the usefulness of the export will depend on the extent to which the Paw-user "dressed up" the request objects.

dep_b4• 9 years ago

Ahhhh that's why I was getting those completely useless Swagger objects!

the usefulness of the export will depend on the extent to which the Paw-user "dressed up" the request objects

cwp• 9 years ago

Yeah, I hate that. I keep getting files that have a ".docx" extension and I have no idea what to do with them. And the designers are using some program that uses ".ps". Thanks guys.

dep_b4• 9 years ago

Not sure if you try to be sarcastic or not. But yeah I expect people to chop up their PS files before they send them to me. docx at least has has free viewers. A PDF or HTML would be better.

_pdp_6• 9 years ago

I will use the opportunity to mention our own tool: https://rest.secapps.com/ - some of you may find it useful

It has vars and rich text editing like Paw, i.e. you can build complex transforms by nesting what we call text items. Here is a blog post how this is done in practice: https://blog.websecurify.com/2017/02/hacking-node-serialize....

We are still working on the UX but there are a lot of cool features in the pipeline.

jozi9• 9 years ago

Also, if you want make test API calls as part of your CI process (or just want to monitor them regularly), I created my own tool: http://www.apilope.com. I always missed such features from REST API tools!

taude• 9 years ago

I'm not sure why I'd use this over Postman, which is platform independent. I know some people are offended by the wrapped web-ish UI, but most of the devs on my team don't even know what an Electron app is and they use Postman everyday. And with Postman, we can run it on Windows, OS X, and Linux. And then there's the team collaboration and scripting it...

trevor-e• 9 years ago

Can someone please describe their workflow using tools like this? Right now I use Charles Proxy for everything and am not sure how this would make it better. Does someone (another team member) share you their API schema? How do you handle headers/auth that needs to be set up all the time?

chrisweekly• 9 years ago

Headers/auth/other setup = trivial to config and save as persistent env.

Charles is fine (I prefer mitmproxy/mitmdump).

RantyDave• 9 years ago

I really like paw but can't say I've tried the alternatives. I needed a thing, it was in the AppStore, go.

oliyoung2• 9 years ago

Paw's killer feature for me is request chaining

GET /things -> GET /things/{things.first.id} -> PUT /things/{things.first.id} -> DELETE /things/{things.first.id}

fredsted4• 9 years ago

Yep. It saves a huge amount of time when testing big API features. You can also insert random tokens, other parts from the request, browser request import, OAuth integration, etc!

trustfundbaby• 9 years ago

Been on the Insomnia REST client bandwagon since they were in beta https://insomnia.rest/ ... went to checkout this page and saw no reason why I'd want to change.

ishanr• 9 years ago

I just use Tabbed Postman https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabbed-postman-res... which is a fork of the original in-browser Postman.

snambi• 9 years ago

Is this similar to REST POSTMAN?

brunomvsouza• 9 years ago

My issue with rest api tools is that for some reason people use them to test API request/response flows instead of coded integration tests.

For API specification we have OpenAPI specification[1] (formerly known as Swagger specification).

[1] https://swagger.io/specification/

kartan• 9 years ago

Maybe I'm too old school. But JMeter is just amazing at this job: http://jmeter.apache.org/

But I guess that it is as useful and complete, as it is ugly. If you don't care for the eye candy, this is the tool to use.

davidgatti• 9 years ago

Native Apps FTW! :D

neillyons• 9 years ago

For a different approach have a look at PyCharm's new REST client https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2017/09/pycharm-2017-3-ea...

pfranz2• 9 years ago

Has anyone used this? How do they like it? It had to be a couple years ago (so it might have been a different iteration), I was testing out some endpoints and figured I'd try PyCharm's new features. I don't have a lot of experience with these tools since it's not a large part of my job, but trying to use it just seemed to frustrate me and slow me down. I went back to curl commands in small shell scripts.

isarat• 9 years ago

I have been a Paw user for 3-4 years now it's super fast and the team delivers new changes without leaving behind the existing user base.

Insomnia is good and better option than Postman and a free alternative. The OSS looks promising as well. It doesn't really matter if it's packed as a web app but electron based apps have decent quality across platforms.

gnlnx• 9 years ago

Is there a way for these tools to work with something like flatbuffers? Ideally, I would import my flatbuffers definitions and the tool would (un)serialize accordingly. I usually end up writing a python script to test APIs but being able to do a lot of that with a nice interface would be useful.

kika• 9 years ago

I learned about Paw and decided to try it. My API is based on Swagger (2.0) and Postman is not a very good friend of it. Paw seems to be clean and while UX is kinda sorta sometimes clunky, I see how it could be better than Postman. But, seriously folks, the app crashed twice within half an hour. I just tried to create different environments (I run next dev version locally and also want to run against current published version). Once it failed when I created the environment and once it failed when I added a variable and tried to undo the edit. Very trivial actions and it seems that the app just doesn't receive testing. I'd expect something similar from an OSS app (I'm the tester then and I'm expected to fill bugs). And I'd probably go ahead and fix it or at least try to debug and find the root cause. But for $50 I expect a product. I want to swipe the credit card and move on with my project.

Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs

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