This technically breaks Rule 3, since it doesn’t cover a self-hosted service or application. However, “local over cloud” is always welcome here. So, leaving this post up, but locking to encourage discussion in the proper communities.
this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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No, the default API tooling that comes to my mind is curl.
Obligatory: https://justuse.org/curl/
It's been downloaded over 20 billion times. It supports 25+ protocols. It's in cars, refrigerators, TV sets, routers, printers, phones, and every goddamn server on the planet.
Everything except my random podman container I need to test something on, but for some reason will have wget lmao.
Also a good time to mention you can use Ctrl+x Ctrl+e to edit your multi line commands in your default terminal editor so you can keep a clean, line separated command which is easy to read and follow.
Is your container using BusyBox? if so, then it's not even real wget, it's just the disgusting awful busybox version.
God I hate BusyBox.
Okey, Ctrl+x Ctrl+e is super cool. I did not know about that! Thanks!
I've used Postman et al. but I often default to PowerShell (because Windows) and a text file. It gives me everything I need from Postman without having to install or learn new tools.
Curl is nice but I miss the object orientation in my shell when I use *sh.
But then how did Postman became so popular - we can't deny it became the default.
Point and drool as opposed to learning cli commands.
CLI is so easy. You learn the basic concepts and can use thousands of tools.
curl is a very common tool. It's installed everywhere, probably also on the postman servers... lol
So did windows in the business world. Just because it's default doesn't mean it's the best option. People will take a pile of poop with a pretty veneer that does 90% of the work over the correct tool with a leaning curve.
But that was a good while ago. And it was not a cloud thing at the time it was popular.
There are many alternatives now.
There are a few other options, such as Bruno.
But if you can spare the time to learn curl it's probably the most versatile.
Bruno is pretty decent, though I don't like that it's not fully FOSS. The whole premium feature stuff is closed source, if I'm not mistaken.
subscription based right?
It's free for a single user, but you pay a subscription per user for collaborative use.
I'm just a solo enthusiast so it's free for what I'd use it for.
Edit: I guess to your earlier point perhaps this a step towards enshitification and they might well put more and more tools behind a paywall.
Yup, Bruno is my choice as well coming from Insomnia and Postman. I was lucky enough to purchase the early supporter lifetime license when it was available, so I'll be using it for the foreseeable future. Hopefully it doesn't enshittify as another commenter pointed out.
While I still use curl for simple requests, I really do like having a GUI. Features like prettifying requests and responses, being able to fold code, saving requests, shared authorization across multiple requests, etc. Are the reasons why I don't think I could ever really use CLI options.
Bruno and Yaak are both pretty decent, I use Yaak on a daily basis. There's also HTTPie, Hoppscotch, Insomnia and Scalar.
There's also https://hurl.dev/ for those that like curl
That looks cool, I also just discovered https://github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden, which seems similar but uses Markdown instead.
Postman locked all my locally saved requests away after an update unless I created an account with them. I wasn't updating very often because every update made it shittier.
Fuck postman.
I've been all in on Bruno ever since.
In emacs, there is http mode, and you can have http code blocks straight in an org mode document, it's amazing. And it works with the overall org babel system, so variables can come from other blocks, potentially in different languages.
What about Hoppscotch? hoppscotch.io
I've been searching for alternatives as well, especially since Insomnia introduced mandatory account creation.
I think Yaak is pretty good and I recently found out about Voiden, though I haven't had a chance to try it out yet.
Edit: I forgot to mention that if you're using IntelliJ Ultimate for what you're doing, it has a built-in HTTP client too. We use that a lot at work, because then you can have the requests directly together with your application's source code inside your repository, which is kinda handy.
I still use Insomnia as I think it offers the better experience over Postman, but I wouldn't recommend it as it gets shifted more and more into a forced subscription model.
I have installed Hopscotch, but Insomnia still works so I never felt the need to switch - but I am ready to do so.