Before publishing an API or integrating third-party APIs into your systems, it is essential to ensure everything works correctly. That’s why platforms like Postman exist. They provide users and developers with an API client that allows them to create, organize, and test APIs (as well as monitor them once in production).

What is Postman?

Postman is a platform for API development and testing that allows you to create and share collections, automate tests, and monitor the performance of Application Programming Interfaces. 

Like other similar platforms, Postman’s purpose is to simplify and speed up the development and release of new APIs by providing an environment that manages every aspect of your APIs and facilitates collaboration among developers.

Through its graphical interface, you can perform HTTP requests, automate tests with JavaScript scripts, view server responses, and organize APIs into request collections. Other useful features of the platform include API response simulation, documentation and code generation in various programming languages, and the ability to explore public APIs through the Postman API Network.

Main features of Postman

As an all-in-one API platform, Postman is designed to support developers throughout the entire API lifecycle, from design to monitoring. Above all, its purpose is to provide an API client, meaning a tool that enables communication with APIs, as well as a space to store and organize responses, templates, and documentation. 

To briefly describe Postman, we can look at its main features, namely:

• API client: Postman is essentially an API client that allows you to easily create, test, organize, and reuse APIs. The client automatically detects the response language and includes built-in support for various authentication protocols;
• API repository: one of Postman’s main functions is to store, catalog, and share all API development resources within a centralized platform, organizing specifications, documentation, test cases, and statistics;
• Shared workspace: another key purpose of Postman is to facilitate collaboration between developers (and beyond) through shared workspaces with team members or external users.

Another important function of Postman’s API client concerns governance. The platform allows you to establish internal standards and define templates for requests, responses, and tests, helping to develop secure and consistent APIs while avoiding unnecessary proliferation.

Postman API platform: where to start

Postman’s API tools are accessible via a desktop application available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. If you don’t want to download Postman, you can use the web-based version, but be aware that Postman online doesn’t allow all the operations available in the desktop version (for example, you can’t capture API traffic via proxy).

The workspace is divided into several sections, including:

• Workspaces: allow you to organize APIs and collaborate with other developers by synchronizing work. They can be Internal (accessible only to the team), Partner (open to certain users by invitation), or Public (accessible to everyone);
• Request builder: the space used to configure HTTP requests by selecting method, URL, headers, etc.;
• Response viewer: where server responses are displayed (in JSON, XML, HTML, or plain text format);
• Collections: organized sets of API requests that can be reused, automated, and shared;
• Flows: a graphical interface for creating automated flows of tests and API interactions;
• APIs: a section for centrally managing and documenting APIs;
• Monitors: used to monitor the status of APIs and receive error notifications.

By navigating through these sections, you can verify, test, debug, and monitor every single API call. 

Postman tools for API development

To understand how to use Postman to test APIs, document them, and monitor their performance, it’s useful to introduce the platform’s key API tools:

• Design: Postman’s visual editor allows you to create API endpoints, set parameters, request and response payloads, and authentication settings, while documenting everything. API specifications can be designed using OpenAPI, RAML, GraphQL, or SOAP. From here, you can also generate collections for mockups, testing, monitoring, or other development phases;
• Test: automated API testing with Postman enables continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows. You can also use post-response scripts for debugging, run unit tests, integration tests, and load tests;
• Mock servers: these servers, available locally and in test environments, allow you to see exactly how an API will run before it goes live and to simulate API endpoints when sending requests to a real API isn’t possible;
• Monitors: hosted on Postman’s cloud, these monitors check the status and performance of APIs. They can run from different geographic regions and integrate with third-party alert systems and dashboards;
• API detection: this tool intercepts and inspects requests passing between client applications and APIs, capturing HTTP and HTTPS traffic. 

How to use Postman to test Openapi’s APIs?

In addition to developers, Postman is extremely useful for API users. Not only does it provide access to the official documentation for third-party APIs—covering URLs, available endpoints, HTTP methods (GET, POST, etc.), and formats (e.g., JSON)—but it also allows you to test APIs and evaluate their compatibility with your systems through integration tests.

In addition to unit tests on individual requests and responses, you can run end-to-end tests, regression tests to ensure APIs continue working after changes and updates, and performance tests that simulate user traffic to observe API behavior under load.

All Openapi APIs are organized into Postman collections available to users. To test individual APIs, simply go to the Openapi console, select the API you want to test, and from the “Documentation” page, follow the link to Postman, which takes you directly to our API Collections.