Bruno vs Insomnia

Comparing two open source alternatives to Postman and Thunder Client and Stoplight and Paw and Apidog and ReadyAPI and SwaggerHub . Use the comparison below to decide which one fits your needs.

Bruno

MIT

Opensource IDE For Exploring and Testing API's (lightweight alternative to Postman/Insomnia)

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Insomnia

Apache-2.0

The open-source, cross-platform API client for GraphQL, REST, WebSockets, SSE and gRPC. With Cloud, Local and Git storage.

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Side-by-side comparison

	Bruno	Insomnia
License	MIT	Apache-2.0
Self-hostable	No	No
GitHub Stars	45,167	39,748
Forks	2,618	2,347
Open Issues	1,732	848
Last Commit	Jun 26, 2026	Jun 26, 2026
First Released	Sep 27, 2022	Apr 23, 2016
Categories	API Development & Testing Tools	API Development & Testing Tools
Tags	#API #rest #http client #api client #openapi	#API #rest #http client #api client

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