Postman is an API development platform that started life as a simple Chrome extension for firing HTTP requests against REST APIs and has since grown into a comprehensive tool covering the full API lifecycle: design, develop, test, mock, document, and monitor. Requests are organized into collections, which can be grouped, versioned, and shared, while environments provide scoped variables for switching between local, staging, and production targets without rewriting URLs, headers, or credentials. The desktop and web apps offer a visual request builder, a scripting sandbox for pre-request and test code, and auto-generated documentation derived from the collections themselves.
Beyond REST, Postman supports GraphQL with schema introspection and a visual query builder, gRPC with reflection-based service discovery and streaming, WebSocket connections for bidirectional message streams, as well as SOAP and MQTT. Newman, the open-source command-line collection runner, executes the same collections used interactively in CI pipelines such as GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or GitLab CI, which makes it straightforward to turn an exploratory request flow into an automated contract or integration test. Mock servers, monitors, and OpenAPI/AsyncAPI definitions tie the design and runtime sides of an API together inside a single workspace.
Postman Cloud underpins the collaboration story: workspaces are the unit of sharing, with personal, team, partner, and public scopes. The Public API Network exposes tens of thousands of published collections and APIs from vendors and community authors, making Postman a common distribution channel for vendor-supplied API examples. Pricing is commercial with a free tier covering individual use and small teams; paid plans add team workspaces, governance, single sign-on, and enterprise controls.
