
Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs - michaelsbradley
https://paw.cloud/client
======
mosselman
I have a Paw license and recently I started using Insomnia instead:
[https://insomnia.rest/](https://insomnia.rest/)

I find Paw's project management very annoying. It assumes that I am working on
some project and wants me to organise everything like that. Fine, lets do it,
so where are my projects? They are hidden in some dropdown that you can have
fun finding.

Insomnia is much cleaner and more to the point.

~~~
mcescalante
Other reasons that I also like Insomnia (I've used Paw as well):

\- Cross platform

\- Simpler use for non-experts

\- No need for pro (paid subscription) for my needs, so it's completely free

\- Feels nicer than all of the browser "REST explorer" plugins

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thejosh
Haven't used paw, but agreed with above about Insomnia, and:

\- GraphQL support is pretty decent

\- Copy as CURL is awesome

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gschier
Don't forget the ability to paste a curl command into the url to import it!

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kevinastone
paw has both these features (export to curl or httpie and import from curl)

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mosselman
And it costs $50. Also, I am sure that many people know that Paw is a good
tool. It is just expensive and I don't like the UX.

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dorian-graph
For quick-and-dirty things I use cURL or httpie otherwise I use Paw (and have
for about a year now). I had previously used Postman before that, but even
then Paw was a better app—native app so it looked better + felt faster, nicer
collections, better default shortcuts, etc.

Paw has a lot of power behind it, otherwise if you're just doing basic POST
requests, stick to httpie. The code generators and extensions are nice. Easily
switching between environments (e.g. dev, staging, prod). History of run
requests. Tying values from other requests into other requests—e.g. get an
auth token from a login request, and use that in a header in all other
requests. I still only use a fairly basic amount of the features too. It's a
very polished app, and the devs seem good too.

~~~
OJFord
Just to play devil's advocate: I do all of that in Postman, which for the last
year or so has also been a native app - at least, in the sense of being non-
Chrome, it's not using macOS UI elements. I think different environments is a
recent feature too.

It's free, and cross-platform. And the team sharing capabilities are cheaper
than Paw's. It's odd that Paw seems to bill its single platform nature as a
feature.

There's some great FOSS alternatives too!

~~~
kiliankoe
Isn't Postman's "native" app electron-based instead of being the chrome
packaged app from before? So they basically went from Chrome to Chromium and
started calling it native...

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OJFord
It's not as bad as that, it went from 'You need Chrome so you can install this
app' to 'Download this standalone package'.

Postman may or may not call it native, I did here, and then tried to clarify
what I meant since I realised it's nativeness depended on context.

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oliyoung
Paw's killer feature for me is request chaining

GET /things -> GET /things/{things.first.id} -> PUT /things/{things.first.id}
-> DELETE /things/{things.first.id}

~~~
fredsted
Yep. It saves a huge amount of time when testing big API features. You can
also insert random tokens, other parts from the request, browser request
import, OAuth integration, etc!

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dewey
I use Paw almost every day and my usual workflow is:

1) Copy request as curl from the Chrome Inspector

2) Import curl command into Paw via their importer

3) Inspect request, play around with parameters etc.

That is a really great feature of Paw and saves a lot of time and is worth the
money for it. I also discovered some bugs and reported them and they were
usually fixed in the next release and the developer is fast and responsive
about them.

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donatj
I used to use Postman but never really actually _liked it_. It just was OK.

I found and loved Paw right up until they broke the way GET parameters work. I
want to be able to edit them as part of the URL string and removing that
option is obnoxious.

I still use it nearly every day, but every time I go to edit the URL and it
switches to the GET param editor I cringe.

Also, I've had a PR open to fix their cURL generators escaping since June…

\- [https://github.com/luckymarmot/Paw-
cURLCodeGenerator/pull/13](https://github.com/luckymarmot/Paw-
cURLCodeGenerator/pull/13)

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isarat
I have been a Paw user for 3-4 years now it's super fast and the team delivers
new changes without leaving behind the existing user base.

Insomnia is good and better option than Postman and a free alternative. The
OSS looks promising as well. It doesn't really matter if it's packed as a web
app but electron based apps have decent quality across platforms.

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dep_b
People pass me paw files like I'm supposed to have it installed. I don't
understand it. "Here's the documentation of the API". OK thanks.

~~~
cwp
Yeah, I hate that. I keep getting files that have a ".docx" extension and I
have no idea what to do with them. And the designers are using some program
that uses ".ps". Thanks guys.

~~~
dep_b
Not sure if you try to be sarcastic or not. But yeah I expect people to chop
up their PS files before they send them to me. docx at least has has free
viewers. A PDF or HTML would be better.

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joshstrange
This will obviously make some people think of Postman so I wanted to give my
take. I, along with my team, currently use Postman (without team sync). I'd
love to switch to Paw but I think we are close to getting the company to pay
for team sync and I'd hate to pay $50 then have to constantly be
exporting/importing into Postman<->Paw.

I'd jump on Paw for the whole team as the $10/mo for the entire team for
syncing is very attractive vs Postman Pro $8/user/mo (hell, I'd pay it myself)
but I am the only macOS user (the rest on linux) and while we can debate the
value of electron apps all day long they do serve a purpose.

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kika
I learned about Paw and decided to try it. My API is based on Swagger (2.0)
and Postman is not a very good friend of it. Paw seems to be clean and while
UX is kinda sorta sometimes clunky, I see how it could be better than Postman.
But, seriously folks, the app crashed twice within half an hour. I just tried
to create different environments (I run next dev version locally and also want
to run against current published version). Once it failed when I created the
environment and once it failed when I added a variable and tried to undo the
edit. Very trivial actions and it seems that the app just doesn't receive
testing. I'd expect something similar from an OSS app (I'm the tester then and
I'm expected to fill bugs). And I'd probably go ahead and fix it or at least
try to debug and find the root cause. But for $50 I expect a product. I want
to swipe the credit card and move on with my project.

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taude
I'm not sure why I'd use this over Postman, which is platform independent. I
know some people are offended by the wrapped web-ish UI, but most of the devs
on my team don't even know what an Electron app is and they use Postman
everyday. And with Postman, we can run it on Windows, OS X, and Linux. And
then there's the team collaboration and scripting it...

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brunomvsouza
My issue with rest api tools is that for some reason people use them to test
API request/response flows instead of coded integration tests.

For API specification we have OpenAPI specification[1] (formerly known as
Swagger specification).

[1] [https://swagger.io/specification/](https://swagger.io/specification/)

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trustfundbaby
Been on the Insomnia REST client bandwagon since they were in beta
[https://insomnia.rest/](https://insomnia.rest/) ... went to checkout this
page and saw no reason why I'd want to change.

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_pdp_
I will use the opportunity to mention our own tool:
[https://rest.secapps.com/](https://rest.secapps.com/) \- some of you may find
it useful

It has vars and rich text editing like Paw, i.e. you can build complex
transforms by nesting what we call text items. Here is a blog post how this is
done in practice: [https://blog.websecurify.com/2017/02/hacking-node-
serialize....](https://blog.websecurify.com/2017/02/hacking-node-
serialize.html)

We are still working on the UX but there are a lot of cool features in the
pipeline.

~~~
jozi9
Also, if you want make test API calls as part of your CI process (or just want
to monitor them regularly), I created my own tool:
[http://www.apilope.com](http://www.apilope.com). I always missed such
features from REST API tools!

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lowbloodsugar
I've used it for over a year and I like it. I have to debug things like SAML
IdP/SP handshakes and session management for SSO in multiple environments as
multiple users.

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s_dev
I have Paw through my SetApp bundle that I pay €9 a month for. Don't think I'd
buy it as it's basically the same as Postman though maybe a little prettier.

~~~
coreyja
This is my first time hearing about `SetApp` but it sounds like an interesting
concept. How do you feel about it? How many apps from it so you use
often/daily? Worth the $10 a month?

~~~
danpalmer
I had a trial and found the selection for developers wasn't worth the $10.

There are a few little utilities, like the Regex tester, that are definitely
neat and well made, but given the once a month I actually need that
functionality, I'll just use a crappy web app for it.

Most of the software I found to be the 3rd best in its category (or worse),
for example, It doesn't have OmniFocus or Things, it has a bunch of to-do list
apps I've never heard of that all have poor design and UX. Besides that
there's a lot of the soft of system enhancer software that I thought made my
computer go faster when I was younger but that I've now realised is mostly
pointless.

For me to resubscribe to SetApp, I'd want to see best-in-class apps like
Things, OmniFocus, SublimeText (or even BBEdit, I'm not a fan, but it's a good
Mac app), RapidWeaver (again, not for me, but good for many), Transmit, Coda,
Delicious Library, etc. I'd probably pay more than $10 for that sort of
selection.

~~~
oliyoung
but OP's point is that a Paw subscription /alone/ is $12/m

~~~
danpalmer
Oh apologies. I'd expect that's not a like-for-like comparison. Paw is a paid
app, and then has team-sync subscriptions, the former is in SetApp, the latter
is not.

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softinio
I am for supporting other software developers and great tools but quite
honestly its not worth the $$$

Have used postman for years with no issues and recently have started using
this which I think is actually great especially if you have zsh and fzf for
searching what you have run previously on terminal:

[https://httpie.org/](https://httpie.org/)

~~~
asf4232
Our team of ~30 mixed roll engineering types are using httpie and dig it

We collaborate in shared tmux sessions quite a bit, though, so being able to
open a pane and run it for others to view is legit.

Having used Paw, it is for those that must have a UI that looks like a
traditional Mac app.

Nothing more of value there.

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ishanr
I just use Tabbed Postman [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabbed-
postman-res...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabbed-postman-rest-
clien/coohjcphdfgbiolnekdpbcijmhambjff?hl=en-GB) which is a fork of the
original in-browser Postman.

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gnlnx
Is there a way for these tools to work with something like flatbuffers?
Ideally, I would import my flatbuffers definitions and the tool would
(un)serialize accordingly. I usually end up writing a python script to test
APIs but being able to do a lot of that with a nice interface would be useful.

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neillyons
For a different approach have a look at PyCharm's new REST client
[https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2017/09/pycharm-2017-3-ea...](https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2017/09/pycharm-2017-3-eap-2/)

~~~
pfranz
Has anyone used this? How do they like it? It had to be a couple years ago (so
it might have been a different iteration), I was testing out some endpoints
and figured I'd try PyCharm's new features. I don't have a lot of experience
with these tools since it's not a large part of my job, but trying to use it
just seemed to frustrate me and slow me down. I went back to curl commands in
small shell scripts.

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trevor-e
Can someone please describe their workflow using tools like this? Right now I
use Charles Proxy for everything and am not sure how this would make it
better. Does someone (another team member) share you their API schema? How do
you handle headers/auth that needs to be set up all the time?

~~~
chrisweekly
Headers/auth/other setup = trivial to config and save as persistent env.

Charles is fine (I prefer mitmproxy/mitmdump).

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kartan
Maybe I'm too old school. But JMeter is just amazing at this job:
[http://jmeter.apache.org/](http://jmeter.apache.org/)

But I guess that it is as useful and complete, as it is ugly. If you don't
care for the eye candy, this is the tool to use.

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InTheArena
$50? Ouch. I support developers making a living, but this is a market with a
lot of competition, some of it free, some of it great, and some of it free and
great.

If it were $19, the professional looking UI would have had me pull the
trigger, but $50 is way on the other side of of my price sensitivity.

~~~
chrissnell
I don't use Paw (I'm a Linux-on-the-desktop user) and I have no idea who they
are but a one-time $50 cost doesn't bother me if it's something that is a key
tool for my job and is demonstrably better than its competitors in the market.

In other words, if it's good enough for me to spend $20 on a license, it's
good enough for me to spend $50.

~~~
InTheArena
True, but does this do things better then postman? What's my migration cost?
For that matter, why not just use curl?

There is of course, value, but there $50 price point I reserve for things
absolutely critical, with little good competition - for Example Tower, or
OmniFocus.

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sbr464
Any info on graphql support? I know postman and others don’t, would be nice to
have a single tool.

~~~
e1g
Insomnia supports GraphQL pretty well

~~~
gschier
Thanks for mentioning this. It's awesome to hear that this feature is getting
real use!

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apearson
Anyone have any experience with how this compares to Postman?

~~~
danpalmer
I've found Paw to have much better UX than Postman. Plus it's not an Electron
app which is always nice.

~~~
christotty
Maybe I'm lucky, but I've used Postman quite a bit and never ran into an issue
caused by it being Electron based. For that matter, my favorite code editor,
VS Code, is in that same boat.

~~~
valuearb
I hate non-native apps. VS Code is so good it's forcing me to grudgingly admit
that there can be good exceptions.

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RantyDave
I really like paw but can't say I've tried the alternatives. I needed a thing,
it was in the AppStore, go.

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davidgatti
Native Apps FTW! :D

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snambi
Is this similar to REST POSTMAN?

