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Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs
- InTheArena 9y 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 9y agoI'm on the same page. I'm not totally sure it's worth the money they're asking.
- eli 9y ago(Offtopic, but HNers thinking of creating a startup that sells tools to developers should heed these comments.)
- fny 9y agoThis 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.
- InTheArena 9y agoAgreed, 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 9y agoI 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.
- InTheArena 9y agoTrue, 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 9y agoFor 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__ 9y agoGood, reliable tool, with great native UI is very well worth one time $50 purchase.
- eddieroger 9y agoI 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 9y agoSeriously? 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.
- apearson 9y agoAnyone have any experience with how this compares to Postman?
- zhs 9y agosignificantly more buggy in my experience (this was a few months ago though)
- danpalmer 9y agoI've found Paw to have much better UX than Postman. Plus it's not an Electron app which is always nice.
- christotty 9y agoMaybe 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.
- valuearb 9y agoI hate non-native apps. VS Code is so good it's forcing me to grudgingly admit that there can be good exceptions.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoPostman 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!
- joshstrange 9y agoThis is slightly misleading, that is only for their monitoring service. You can make (and I do) as many manual requests as you want.
- Artemis2 9y agoPaw 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.
- s_dev 9y agoI 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 9y agoThis 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?
- danpalmer 9y agoI 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.
- softinio 9y agoI 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/ https://httpie.org/
- asf4232 9y agoOur 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.
- joshstrange 9y agoThis 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.
- mosselman 9y agoI have a Paw license and recently I started using Insomnia instead: https://insomnia.rest/ 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 9y agoOther 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 9y agoAgree on these points as well, also love that it's open source[0] [0]: https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia https://github.com/getinsomnia/insomnia
- thejosh 9y agoHaven't used paw, but agreed with above about Insomnia, and: - GraphQL support is pretty decent - Copy as CURL is awesome
- gschier 9y agoDon't forget the ability to paste a curl command into the url to import it!
- kevinastone 9y agopaw has both these features (export to curl or httpie and import from curl)
- mosselman 9y ago
- dorian-graph 9y agoFor 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.
- OJFord 9y agoJust 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 9y agoIsn'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...
- OJFord 9y agoIt's not as bad as that, it went from 'You need Chrome so you can install this app' to 'Download this standalone package'. Postman may or may not call it native, I did here, and then tried to clarify what I meant since I realised it's nativeness depended on context.
- tonetheman 9y agoAnd really they did that because Google decided to take packaged apps away from mainstream operating systems. Packaged applications still work in ChromeOS but soon packaged apps are going away from Windows/OSX.
- sbr464 9y agoAny info on graphql support? I know postman and others don’t, would be nice to have a single tool.
- dewey 9y agoI 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 9y agoI'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 9y agoI 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 https://github.com/luckymarmot/Paw-cURLCodeGenerator/pull/13
- dep_b 9y agoPeople 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.
- michaelsbradley 9y agoPaw 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_b 9y agoAhhhh 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
- michaelsbradley 9y agoOpenAPI / Swagger is just JSON which describes the input and output data from an API's endpoints. If you want to know, prior to runtime (of your code), what kind of data an API will accept and return, and if you don't have access to the API's source code, in what would format would you prefer to have the information documented? I don't have in mind a right or wrong answer, just curious.
- dep_b 9y agoWell everything was defined as String even when it was expecting an Int or Bool value. But sometimes an Int still needed to be wrapped in double quotes to work. No date formats. Objects returned of type class A sometimes had only 30% of it's fields populated (like after an insert only the database ID and creation date). Fields expecting an enum like value but the expected values not specified. I mean it makes sense if you just export some kind of Postman / Paw configuration without paying any attention to it. File > Export > Bye Bye. Of course most of my complaints are related to a lazy programmer sending "documentation" with the absolute least amount of effort possible, but I now at least understand how it was made and why it was as awful as it was.
- _pdp_ 9y agoI will use the opportunity to mention our own tool: https://rest.secapps.com/ 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.html 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 9y agoAlso, 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 http://www.apilope.com. I always missed such features from REST API tools!
- taude 9y agoI'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 9y agoCan 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 9y agoHeaders/auth/other setup = trivial to config and save as persistent env. Charles is fine (I prefer mitmproxy/mitmdump).
- RantyDave 9y agoI really like paw but can't say I've tried the alternatives. I needed a thing, it was in the AppStore, go.
- oliyoung 9y agoPaw'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}
- fredsted 9y agoYep. 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 9y agoBeen on the Insomnia REST client bandwagon since they were in beta https://insomnia.rest/ https://insomnia.rest/ ... went to checkout this page and saw no reason why I'd want to change.
- ishanr 9y agoI just use Tabbed Postman https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabbed-postman-rest-clien/coohjcphdfgbiolnekdpbcijmhambjff?hl=en-GB https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabbed-postman-res... which is a fork of the original in-browser Postman.
- snambi 9y agoIs this similar to REST POSTMAN?
- brunomvsouza 9y agoMy 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/ https://swagger.io/specification/
- kartan 9y agoMaybe I'm too old school. But JMeter is just amazing at this job: http://jmeter.apache.org/ 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 9y agoNative Apps FTW! :D
- neillyons 9y agoFor a different approach have a look at PyCharm's new REST client https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2017/09/pycharm-2017-3-eap-2/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2017/09/pycharm-2017-3-ea...
- pfranz 9y agoHas 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 9y agoI 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 9y agoIs 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 9y agoI 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.