Bruno vs Postman: Which API Client Won't Drive You Insane?

Postman jacked up their pricing again, Bruno hit 36k+ GitHub stars and keeps pushing updates, and every developer I know is asking "should I switch?"

I've been using Postman for 4 years. It works great until your team grows past 3 people and you're paying $14-49/month per developer for what's basically a fancy HTTP client. Then Bruno shows up - completely free, works offline, stores everything in plain text files that work with Git.

The catch? Bruno is missing half of Postman's features. But for most teams, those missing features are bloat anyway.

Here's what I learned using both tools on production APIs for the past 6 months.

Postman Will Murder Your RAM (And Your Budget)

My MacBook Air sounds like a jet engine whenever Postman's running. Activity Monitor shows 400-600MB of RAM usage just to send HTTP requests. That's more than VS Code with 20 tabs open. I learned this debugging a Node app where everything was slow as shit - turns out Postman was hogging all the memory.

Bruno uses way less RAM. It starts in seconds instead of Postman's painful boot time. On my MacBook Pro, the difference is insane - no more waiting for Postman to boot while your teammate is already testing endpoints.

But the real kicker is pricing. Postman now charges $14-49/month per user depending on your plan. For a 10-person team on Professional, that's $3,480/year for an HTTP client. Bruno is free forever.

The Git Thing Actually Matters

Bruno stores your API collections as .bru files. Sounds boring until you realize you can:

• Diff API changes in pull requests
• Blame someone for breaking the auth endpoint
• Never lose collections when Postman's servers go down (happened twice last year)
• Review API changes alongside code changes

I've had Postman collections disappear before - disappeared right before some important meeting, made me look like a fucking idiot. That shit is never happening again with files in Git.

Nearform documented their migration and found the Git integration actually improved their workflow. More developers started contributing to API tests once everything lived in the same repo.

What You'll Actually Miss (And It Hurts)

Mock servers. Bruno doesn't have them, period. You'll need to run json-server or something else if you're doing frontend development without backend APIs. I found this out the hard way when our frontend dev needed to demo a feature before the API was ready - had to scramble to set up json-server in 20 minutes.

Real-time collaboration is gone too. With Bruno, collaboration means "commit your changes and push to Git." Some teams love this, others hate it.

The documentation generation is basic. If you're selling APIs to external developers, Postman's auto-generated docs are actually useful. Bruno's docs look like someone threw together a basic HTML table.

The Git Integration Is Actually Good

Bruno stores your API collections as plain text files.

This sounds boring until you realize you can:

• Diff API changes in pull requests
• Blame someone for breaking the auth endpoint
• Never lose collections when Postman's servers are down
• Review API test changes alongside code changes in the same PR

I've had Postman collections disappear before.

Just gone, poof. That's not happening with files in Git.

The Nearform team found the Git integration actually improved their workflow. More developers started contributing to API tests once everything lived in the same repo.

What You'll Miss From Postman

Mock servers. Bruno doesn't have them. You'll need to run json-server or something else. If you're doing frontend development without backend APIs, this sucks.

Documentation generation is basic. Postman's auto-generated docs are actually useful if you're selling APIs to external developers. Bruno's docs are still a work in progress.

Real-time collaboration is nonexistent. With Bruno, collaboration means "commit your changes and push to Git." Some teams love this, others hate it.

The Import Process (aka Half a Day of WTF Moments)

Most of your Postman collections will import fine, but plan to spend time fixing the weird edge cases:

• pm.test() assertions need rewriting to Bruno's assert() syntax
• spent way too long hunting down why pm.response.to.have.status(200) wouldn't work.

Turns out Bruno wants assert(response.status).to.equal(200).

• Dynamic variables like {{$timestamp}} break completely
• Bruno throws Variable not found errors. Had to replace all my timestamp generation with manual Java

Script in pre-request scripts.

• OAuth flows need rebuilding because Bruno uses different auth libraries
• my Google OAuth setup kept failing with "invalid_client" errors. The secret was buried in some random GitHub issue, took forever to find.
• Environment variable references sometimes randomly fail with Cannot resolve variable even when they clearly exist in the environment file. Restarting Bruno usually fixes it, but still annoying.

Could take a few hours or half a day depending on how complex your auth is. It's not Bruno's fault

• Postman uses tons of proprietary functions that only work in their sandbox.

Performance: Bruno Actually Delivers

My Mac

Book Pro sounds like a jet engine with Postman running.

Activity Monitor shows it eating RAM like crazy just sitting there doing nothing. I've had Postman crash during presentations because it ran out of memory on a machine with 16GB RAM. Bruno barely uses any

• maybe 100-200MB tops.

Startup time is night and day. Postman takes 30-45 seconds to boot with large collections (2000+ requests). Bruno starts instantly every time, like under 3 seconds.

Request execution feels faster too. Bruno talks directly to APIs instead of going through Postman's proxy servers. I timed a simple GET request

• Postman averaged 180ms, Bruno averaged 95ms to the same endpoint. Not scientific, but consistent.

Things That Will Annoy You

Bruno:

• Environment switching is slow
• you have to click through dropdowns instead of Postman's Cmd+E shortcut.

Muscle memory fail.

• No Graph

QL introspection

• had to manually type out schema from GraphiQL. Copy-pasting 200 lines of GraphQL sucked.
• The CLI exists but Newman is way more mature for CI/CD. Spent hours trying to get proper JUnit reports from Bruno CLI.
• Collection sharing with non-developers is painful
• our QA team refused to learn Git just for API tests. "Why can't I just click share?"
• Plugin ecosystem is tiny
• no AWS Cognito plugin, had to write auth manually. Took me 4 hours to figure out the signature v4 bullshit.

Postman:

• RAM usage will throttle your other apps (learned this debugging Node apps that kept timing out)
• Collections occasionally vanish from cloud sync
• disappeared during some migration, we lost a bunch of time rebuilding everything
• Every year they raise prices and remove features from the free plan.

What used to be free now costs $14/month.

• Your API requests flow through their servers
• not great when testing against prod endpoints with PII
• The interface gets more cluttered with each update (where the fuck did they move the environment dropdown this time?)

When to Make the Switch (Or Stay Put)

Go with Bruno if:

• You're tired of paying $14-49/month per developer for an HTTP client
• Your team already lives in Git workflows
• API request privacy actually matters (finance, healthcare, etc.)
• You want tools that boot fast and don't eat RAM
• Your collections are mostly basic REST API testing

Stick with Postman if:

• You need mock servers for frontend development (this is a dealbreaker
• Bruno just doesn't have them)
• Your team includes non-developers who hate Git (QA folks, PMs, etc.)
• You're selling APIs and need decent documentation generation
• You have complex monitoring requirements (uptime checks, scheduled runs)
• You use advanced features like API versioning, team workspaces, or detailed reporting

The Bottom Line

Bruno won't replace Postman for everyone, but it nails the 80% use case: fast API testing without vendor lock-in or subscription fees. If you're a developer who lives in Git anyway, Bruno feels natural. If you need the enterprise bells and whistles, you'll pay for Postman and deal with the RAM usage.