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.
Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs
31–40 of 121 posts
Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs
#32$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.
I switched to Paw after spending many hours over several days wondering why the API I was calling was working sporadically through the client I was using at the time, Postman. $50 is nothing compared to the pay my company spent for me to realize Postman was using Chrome's settings (and more importantly, cookies and caching), and thus causing me inconsistent results. I agree $50 is steep, but Paw is well worth it, and I've been thrilled to use it ever since.
Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs
#33I have a Paw license and recently I started using Insomnia instead: 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.
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
Agree on these points as well, also love that it's open source[0]
Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs
#34I 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
Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs
#35I have a Paw license and recently I started using Insomnia instead: 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.
I was on the verge of buying a licence for Paw a couple of months ago, but discovered Insomnia, and been using that instead. (Formerly used Postman before that).
To me, the functionality of Paw and Insomnia seem very similar, so the $50 licence price deterred me from purchasing Paw. If Paw was closer to the $20 mark, I might have still bought it to have in my arsenal of tools 'just in case'.
My rationale is that if there was nothing else on the market with any equivalent functionality, then $50 for Paw is a no brainer. But when there are other competitive product with equal (or greater) feature sets for free, then the pricing works against it.
Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs
#36People 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.
Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs
#37People 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.
Paw can do a reasonably good job of exporting an OpenAPI (Swagger) 2.0 description of the API, but the usefulness of the export will depend on the extent to which the Paw-user "dressed up" the request objects.
Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs
#38I will use the opportunity to mention our own tool: 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....
We are still working on the UX but there are a lot of cool features in the pipeline.
Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs
#39For 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 nic…
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!
Re: Paw – macOS HTTP client for testing and describing APIs
#40$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.
This is actually a pretty common business model among a tier of "aspirational" mac applications without a subscription model. See panic.com and omnigroup.com for other examples.
Agreed, but this tool is nowhere near the completeness of OmniGraffle, OmniOutline or OmniFocus, all of which I have purchased for full price, and gladly so.
The value doesn't appear to be there for me.