These kinds of things are prime candidate for vibe coding; I don't understand why I would use someone else's. I have a native swift postman ripoff which hardcodes exactly the APIs I'm interested in, and is full of convenience features that make sense to nobody but me.
Sad for all the better postman alternatives, but very happy that postman is in trouble.
No excuse for this in 2026 tbh - get Claude to implement a dark and light mode in tailwind and pick a colour theme. It doesn't mean the product is trash but it's a poor first impression.
Maybe this is what and how it always should have been. My life is better now that an LLM proxies my human sound waves and finger clacks to bits that do what I say - and precisely what I say nothing else
It's wild that building bespoke software that fits your needs instead of relying on a one-size-fits-all approach that you're constantly battling against is frowned upon.
I have to ask myself what business you could possibly be in where you look at the software landscape and think "Yea, this aligns perfectly with my needs".
The UI looks a bit outdated, it gives me vibes of some old software from 2000s somehow (probably because of the Java).
And it would be really helpful to clearly state benefits of using Milkman instead of Postman right on the home page (e.g. performance benchmarks, UX, extendability, etc.). I see that it has some users and 1.3k stars so there're definitely some cool things in Milkman, probably you could just present them better
How about writing it in C++ or Rust and doing away completely with huge memory footprint and long startup times. Java also needs a runtime, which is bothersome.
I suggest using wxWidgets or Qt so you get multi-platform support for free.
Are API testing UIs really relevant anymore? I haven't manually tested an API for almost two years, and my APIs are SO much better. This kind of GUI is going to die over the next 5 years.
I'm thinking the same thing, I haven't have a need for a tool like Postman in a long time, prompting is enough at this point. I wonder what features others use from Postman that an agent can't do quickly.
Quickly eye-balling onprem responses, skipping over UIs and just eyeballing data in general is really useful. Curl can do it but with a couple headers it becomes messy, also RPCs, websockets, etc. It’s just convenient to have a single place where you can eyeball all comms.
You're not wrong - I bought a Bruno "Golden Edition" for $9 two years ago pre-release... and... I just don't use it. I'm not even sure why I keep it around, at 524.5 MB
That's an interesting point. I wonder if over the next X years consumers will free up ALOT of disk space by just using agents and not needing to download and install desktop software.
Full disclosure, I'm building a desktop app called DB Pro [1] which is a modern desktop database client.
We're still doing well, and selling a lot, but we're having to think about what the next 2/3/4/5 years look like...
When I saw the UI, my first thought was "is that written in Java"? And indeed, it is. Kinda funny that it's so easy to spot that language based on its horrible default UI skins alone.
I switched to Yaak, initially compiled it myself but now paying for it. I've not had any issues with it, does what I need and keeps out of the way. Simple yaml files in Git is also nice. I would recommend giving it a spin. I think there is a trial, and you can build it yourself, with a bit of configuring.
I would stay off Insomnia. A few versions ago, they practically took my local configuration ransom so they could force me to create a cloud account. Bruno is (still) not there, but the maintainers are slowly heading that way.
Insomnia has been around for a while but just like this post from a new account, there is a lot of push for bruno, which is usually a redflag. Never trust things that are "preached" for free.
The author appears to be suggesting that a key difference between Bruno and Insomnia is that Milkman not written in JavaScript/Electron, but rather JavaFx (i.e., Java) and thus is faster.
Sad for all the better postman alternatives, but very happy that postman is in trouble.
1. Very similar UX to postman (just minus the bullshit), so a very easy transition.
2. It's FOSS*
3. Most importantly of all, it has a cute dog logo.
* oof, just saw this on another comment: https://royathan.com/blog/the-api-client-hunt/
No excuse for this in 2026 tbh - get Claude to implement a dark and light mode in tailwind and pick a colour theme. It doesn't mean the product is trash but it's a poor first impression.
Oh boi
I have to ask myself what business you could possibly be in where you look at the software landscape and think "Yea, this aligns perfectly with my needs".
I suggest using wxWidgets or Qt so you get multi-platform support for free.
Postman should be seriously worried.
We have a postman collection mainly for testers to manually verify certain aspect of a otherwise fairly unit and end-to-end test covered API.
...and... it's gone
Full disclosure, I'm building a desktop app called DB Pro [1] which is a modern desktop database client.
We're still doing well, and selling a lot, but we're having to think about what the next 2/3/4/5 years look like...
[1] https://dbpro.app
Trading bits you own for rented redundant compute to recreate same seems... suboptimal?
How much power should we burn on everyone's agent recreating curl?*
* yes, agents have tools, but what is and isn't an agent tool is a gray area. "Desktop software" could be an agent tool with a human UI.
https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/14... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50354960
Why all software needs to constantly evolve and grow with features? This is how you end up with what Postman has become.
[0]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re... - rest client storing config locally
[1]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Christia...
[2]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=prawel.r... - same as [0], but with GUI
[3]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=slverma....
etc.
Went with Insomnia instead (which IIRC also wants an account now?) and now just some text-mode VSCode http client.
Jokes aside, why is it better?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50354960