What is Insomnia?

Insomnia is a free, open-source API design and test tool for individual developers and enterprises.

It has an intuitive clean user interface and comes with dozens of useful features that put many commercial alternatives to shame.

Insomnia allows developers to define environment variables like authentication credentials, tokens, or session IDs for re-use globally or within a public/private environment for a seamless development/production workflow.

Insomnia Features

  1. It comes with a clean self-explanatory interface which does not require a steep learning curve.
  2. Insomnia provides full support for REST, SOAP, GraphQL, and GRPC
  3. It helps developers create, organize, and share their API endpoint collections and test them with a few clicks
  4. It includes generated code snippets for several programming languages and tools like Curl, NodeJS, Go, Swift, Python, Java, C, and Rust.
  5. It has a built-in dark mode
  6. Seamless workflow
  7. Request response and delay viewers
  8. Custom header support
  9. Multiple authentication models
  10. Query editor
  11. Advanced URL collection manager
  12. Dozens of plugins which include Swagger plugin and custom-developed extensions
  13. OpenAPI standards
  14. Centralize and Automate Tests
  15. Extensive documentation
  16. Developers can import/ export their API collections
  17. It comes with a rich command-line interface: Inso CLI.
  18. Rich plugin's library.

The free version is open-source, and you can use it for free as it will get a free update. It has community support and includes all the primary functions to design and test APIs.

On the other hand, Insomnia offers custom and extended versions for enterprise and pro developers for building complex headless apps, for a small fee per month.

Platforms

  1. macOS
  2. Linux through Flathub
  3. Windows

License

The free app is released under the MIT license. However, the extended enterprise editions are not.

Resources