API tooling is having a rough year, and that's actually the interesting part.
Postman killed free teams in March. Insomnia forced cloud sync in v8 and is still rebuilding trust. Bruno is absorbing most of the migration wave. And a handful of smaller tools are betting the whole category has been building the wrong abstraction since day one.
I spent the last few weeks actually using seven of these tools on the same real workflow: REST and GraphQL requests, env vars across staging and prod, auth, and docs that are supposed to stay in sync with the requests they describe. Here's where each one actually stands.
The real architectural split
Most comparisons line up feature checkboxes: offline, yes/no; Git integration, yes/no. That misses the real fault line in the category, which isn't a feature. It's where your API definitions actually live.
