Postman is powerful.
Postman also wants your account.
Postman built the category. Then the subscription arrived. A free account caps history at 25 requests. A team seat is $19 a month. Collections sync to their cloud by default. Scrapeman does the opposite of all three, and the whole codebase was written by Claude Opus in public.
Pricing
No subscription cliff
| Scrapeman | Postman | |
|---|---|---|
| Basic / Solo use | Free (unlimited) | Free (limited) |
| History / Collections | Unlimited, local | 25 requests max (free) |
| Team collaboration | Not applicable (local-first) | $19/user/month |
| Cloud sync | Never, all local | Required for some features |
| Account required | No | Yes |
Key differences
Built for different goals
Your data never leaves your machine
Postman syncs collections to their cloud. Requests, responses, and environments can end up on Postman servers.
How Scrapeman handles it
Collections live as .sman YAML in a workspace folder you choose. History, cookies, and auth tokens live in app data, never the workspace. Zero network calls to any third-party.
Auto-decompression
Postman does not auto-decompress gzip, brotli, or deflate responses. You see raw compressed bytes unless you manually decode.
How Scrapeman handles it
All response encodings decoded automatically. You always see readable content, no config needed.
SSE streaming
No native SSE support. You can hit an SSE endpoint but you see the raw stream, not parsed events.
How Scrapeman handles it
First-class SSE: events parsed in real time, displayed with id / event / data fields, connection tracked live.
Every OAuth flow, free
OAuth 2.0 is locked behind a paid plan on Postman. The free tier limits how many tokens you can manage and stores them in the cloud workspace.
How Scrapeman handles it
Client credentials, authorization code, and authorization code + PKCE all ship free. OIDC discovery autofills endpoints from .well-known/openid-configuration. Tokens cache, refresh 30 seconds before expiry, and concurrent requests share one in-flight fetch. JWT inspector decodes header and payload with a live exp countdown.
Where Postman wins
We are not better at everything
- 30+ million users and a public API directory. Almost every commercial API has an official Postman collection you can import in one click.
- Built-in API monitoring, mock servers, and hosted documentation publishing. Scrapeman is request-and-response focused, no monitoring layer.
- Newman CLI for running collections in CI. Scrapeman has pre and post-request scripts with a bru API and a 5-second vm sandbox, but no headless CLI runner yet.
- Team workspaces with real-time collaboration, role-based access control, SSO. Scrapeman is local-first by design, so collaboration goes through git.
- Code generation in 20+ languages via postman-code-generators. Scrapeman ships hand-written generators for curl, JS fetch, Python requests, and Go only.
If a hosted mock server, the Newman CLI, or 20+ language code generation is a hard requirement, stay with Postman. If unlimited history, native proxy, free OAuth 2.0 with PKCE, a load runner, and a WebSocket client matter more, try Scrapeman.
Try it free. Keep it free.
Scrapeman is free forever. No account. No trial. No surprise billing.
Download Scrapeman