Milkman – The Better Alternative to Postman | Hacker News Reader

Milkman – The Better Alternative to Postman

milkman.dev

84 pointsjplunien84 comments

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For a Postman-like experience, I prefer Bruno: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno (not affiliated)

Never used milkman so can't say if it's better, but +1 for Bruno.

1. Very similar UX to postman (just minus the bullshit), so a very easy transition.

2. It's FOSS*

3. Most importantly of all, it has a cute dog logo.

* oof, just saw this on another comment: https://royathan.com/blog/the-api-client-hunt/

The Hurl file format seems good, any new FOSS replacements should probably build on top

Bruno is VC funded.

It's bizarre how this specific area of seemingly simple tooling gets churn and VC money.

Maybe I'm out of touch but I still don't know what any of these tools do that you can't do better and more easily with curl.

You can have “collections” of endpoints and their corresponding request schemas organized. So if you’re working with say.. 15 different APIs from different providers all with their own idiosincracies, you get a centralized place to experiment with them

Also yaak https://yaak.app/

Bruno is also VC funded so it'll go the same way.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5xryHhln5Sc

The UI looks a bit outdated, it gives me vibes of some old software from 2000s somehow (probably because of the Java). And it would be really helpful to clearly state benefits of using Milkman instead of Postman right on the home page (e.g. performance benchmarks, UX, extendability, etc.). I see that it has some users and 1.3k stars so there're definitely some cool things in Milkman, probably you could just present them better

It looks like a windows app running on macOS.

Both the application UI and website are giving open source option from 2008

At this point, "outdated" is a compliment, it means that it has a menu with standard shortcuts, discoverability, accessibility. It means that it won't take 800MB of RAM to provide minimal functionality. It will stay the same across the years and not be subject of experimentation by UI designers thinking that they know better. Postman's UI started so-so and just went worse from there. SoapUI before it offered similar functionality using Swing. It's always the same app, you can rewrite it but there's no reinventing it.

Why?

https://github.com/postmanlabs/postman-app-support/issues/14... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50354960

What is better than the existing, established alternatives https://www.usebruno.com/ and https://insomnia.rest/ ?

Not that I necessarily recommend yaak but this post explains why Bruno and Insomnia are not to be trusted: https://royathan.com/blog/the-api-client-hunt/

I switched to Yaak, initially compiled it myself but now paying for it. I've not had any issues with it, does what I need and keeps out of the way. Simple yaml files in Git is also nice. I would recommend giving it a spin. I think there is a trial, and you can build it yourself, with a bit of configuring.

I think Insomnia and Bruno are both non-native JS apps, I think the moat here is that "this" is not "that".

Insomnia has been around for a while but just like this post from a new account, there is a lot of push for bruno, which is usually a redflag. Never trust things that are "preached" for free.

if you use VS Code, there are a lot of alternatives:

[0]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=humao.re... - rest client storing config locally

[1]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Christia...

[2]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=prawel.r... - same as [0], but with GUI

[3]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=slverma....

etc.

what is wrong with curl and httpie (I mean the open source cli one, no idea what the desktop one does)?

I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but every time somebody mentions Postman or Bruno, I think of https://justuse.org/curl because so much of is is true.

I would stay off Insomnia. A few versions ago, they practically took my local configuration ransom so they could force me to create a cloud account. Bruno is (still) not there, but the maintainers are slowly heading that way.

Looking at such ugly UI breaks my heart :(

I always feel like some sort of crude brute when I read comments like this. I appreciate a good, modern UI/UX, but will always choose a tool that works well and is FOSS, despite any "last decade" look.

Several years ago when I was developing HTTP/RPC apps, I found MilkMan and never used Postman again.

Have you ever heard about Bruno?

Came here to say this. While not perfect, Bruno is certainly the best tool in this category that I have used :)

I don't understand why REST clients are so overcomplicated... We only need an interface for cURL, we don't need cloud synchronization, creating servers, grouping by namespace (or environment, or session, or call what you want), electron, JVM and so on. A simple native app would do the job.

For something lightweight and with a native look on Mac, I use http://mmattozzi.github.io/cocoa-rest-client/ Only HTTP/Rest but that's all I need.

These kinds of things are prime candidate for vibe coding; I don't understand why I would use someone else's. I have a native swift postman ripoff which hardcodes exactly the APIs I'm interested in, and is full of convenience features that make sense to nobody but me.

Sad for all the better postman alternatives, but very happy that postman is in trouble.

Postman as a company will be dead in 2 years.

These days I mostly ask my coding agent to test the APIs. It can use curl create the request, attach all the cookies, whatever is necessary, and send the request, look at the response to all the testing I need. And if I need to manually test something, I ask it to give me a curl command that I can run.

How about writing it in C++ or Rust and doing away completely with huge memory footprint and long startup times. Java also needs a runtime, which is bothersome.

I suggest using wxWidgets or Qt so you get multi-platform support for free.

The author appears to be suggesting that a key difference between Bruno and Insomnia is that Milkman not written in JavaScript/Electron, but rather JavaFx (i.e., Java) and thus is faster.

> New features regularly. There are more and more plugins/features coming.

Why all software needs to constantly evolve and grow with features? This is how you end up with what Postman has become.

I wish the milkman would deliver my milk... In the morning...

You have so many machines Richard

i like bruno. it just works and easy to use. at least it is much better than postman

- I got sick of all those electron-based applications - I created a JavaFx-based workbench

Oh boi

Modern JavaFX isn't your grandparents JavaFX, in fact, modern Java isn't your grandpa's Java.

So I'm my own grandpa? Whats sorcery is this?

Yes, you're a dinosaur now, I am afraid. Kids born in 2000 are 26 year old.

Thanks. You just made me realise that next year I'm 38.

Someone should enhance jmeter...

Yeah.

I'm looking to migrate off postman now and I have downloaded Milkman and ... oh boi. The only app that has a license to ship a UI like that is Calibre.

We are in an age where it’s easier to vibe code your own alternative than to do a quick internet search to check if an alternative already exists.

What a wonderful usage of resources.

It's wild that building bespoke software that fits your needs instead of relying on a one-size-fits-all approach that you're constantly battling against is frowned upon.

I have to ask myself what business you could possibly be in where you look at the software landscape and think "Yea, this aligns perfectly with my needs".

Build your own software if that suits you, all I'm saying is maybe do a quick research for what exists in your space before spending all these tokens.

Right, but Postman would have been a valid choice all the way up until it wasn't. The cost of building your own used to vastly outweigh the cost of having to possibly move to another app, pay for licensing when that changes, etc. But that's changing (especially for something like a GUI to make http requests which feels pretty mechanical for basic use cases).

Tangentially related, one belief I've had since the beginning is that LLMs will result in the decrease in large consulting/software factory companies (good riddance) and one-size-fits-all solutions in favor of solutions tailored to a business's actual needs. I work in a slice of healthcare. There are a handful of big EMRs and they were all built 20 years ago in an industry that changes and so many providers end up having to retrofit their businesses around whatever quirks/workflows the software has. And it's usually one of a few flavors: overly restrictive, too configurable, or worst of all: not restrictive at all. None of those are ideal. But now that the economics are changing, hiring a software dev or 2 at your small/medium-sized company becomes a lot more appalling. And it means they actually get business experience. Which means better software all around. I believe the days of shuffling changing requirements through 4 layers of PM's and BAs and sprint leads only to end up with a solution that looks like it was built playing the telephone game are waning.

Maybe this is what and how it always should have been. My life is better now that an LLM proxies my human sound waves and finger clacks to bits that do what I say - and precisely what I say nothing else

Magnificent. One step closer to self sufficient community ships drifting through the system, meeting up with other ships once a month or less.

This to me is what I always envisioned the end-goal was with OpenAI/Anthropic/etc.

Are API testing UIs really relevant anymore? I haven't manually tested an API for almost two years, and my APIs are SO much better. This kind of GUI is going to die over the next 5 years.

Postman should be seriously worried.

I'm thinking the same thing, I haven't have a need for a tool like Postman in a long time, prompting is enough at this point. I wonder what features others use from Postman that an agent can't do quickly.

Quickly eye-balling onprem responses, skipping over UIs and just eyeballing data in general is really useful. Curl can do it but with a couple headers it becomes messy, also RPCs, websockets, etc. It’s just convenient to have a single place where you can eyeball all comms.

This in fact makes me wonder if there is a good “operations center” not just “dashboard” but for all the dev things, websockets triggering, db stats, running queries etc. We have many semi-custom onprems, they do not behave properly as a fleet I cannot just act like they are cattle. These servers contain many products in many configurations. It’s all quite messy..

I find the CPU/disk space dashboards useless. Stuff like monit is useful but status of literal OS services is only part of the picture. There are many layers here and I sometimes wonder how others do this. Surely not all companies just have disposable fleets of “serverless” things?

You're not wrong - I bought a Bruno "Golden Edition" for $9 two years ago pre-release... and... I just don't use it. I'm not even sure why I keep it around, at 524.5 MB

...and... it's gone

That's an interesting point. I wonder if over the next X years consumers will free up ALOT of disk space by just using agents and not needing to download and install desktop software.

Full disclosure, I'm building a desktop app called DB Pro [1] which is a modern desktop database client.

We're still doing well, and selling a lot, but we're having to think about what the next 2/3/4/5 years look like...

[1] https://dbpro.app

You will own nothing and be happy they said

The things you own often end up owning _you_. Thus owning less stuff can mean being more free. Keep the essentials, wing the rest as you go.

> if over the next X years consumers will free up ALOT of disk space by just using agents and not needing to download and install desktop software

Trading bits you own for rented redundant compute to recreate same seems... suboptimal?

How much power should we burn on everyone's agent recreating curl?*

* yes, agents have tools, but what is and isn't an agent tool is a gray area. "Desktop software" could be an agent tool with a human UI.

> Are API testing UIs really relevant anymore?

We have a postman collection mainly for testers to manually verify certain aspect of a otherwise fairly unit and end-to-end test covered API.

Export to curl?

They are testers, not devs. They don't know how to use command line, or edit environment variables.

Have you considered converting this to an actual test suite in $language with AI doing the majority of the work?

No, not really. It's already unit and end-to-end tested.

But sometimes the tester needs to make a test where they create something via the official API to use it in other parts of the app. They just open Postman (soon to be replaced), select the collection, select the server, select POST-item and of the the races. Not everything needs to be AI.

We could vibe code something specific for our needs, but that would be more or less again just end up something like postman again? At least I currently don't have the vision to see a big change.

This.

Why do you have a collection that is passed to humans for manual testing in the age of agents?

See my other respons to parent.

I did, and you really should take a step back and ask an LLM how it can automate what you're doing manually as described above. You'd be surprised what's possible now.

By the time I decided I should maybe try postman, I was absolutely turned off that it wants you to setup an account (for what?).

Went with Insomnia instead (which IIRC also wants an account now?) and now just some text-mode VSCode http client.

When I saw the UI, my first thought was "is that written in Java"? And indeed, it is. Kinda funny that it's so easy to spot that language based on its horrible default UI skins alone.

Isn’t testing an API just more test cases that Claude toils through? Why do I care about milkman Bruno or postman.

What’s next garbageman?

Jokes aside, why is it better?

I think that it was posted in regards to the recent news, see: Postman silently auto-installs AI plugins and attempts to share all API data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50354960

Spiderman?

Your GUI screenshots are squished on mobile. Stretched vertically.

Oof, outdated UI (website and platform).

No excuse for this in 2026 tbh - get Claude to implement a dark and light mode in tailwind and pick a colour theme. It doesn't mean the product is trash but it's a poor first impression.

In 2026, a website that hasn't been designed to match every other AI slopped up UI is a poor first impression?

Using tailwind != looking like an AI slopped UI. Did you know tailwind existed before ChatGPT?

You can actually be involved in the design direction rather than just accept the first iteration and get rid of all that italic text.

when will it run on AmigaOS?

i hate this more than electron

Yet another Postman alternative...

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