Postman Vs Thunderclient Vs Rest Client - VS-CODE API Client War!

Postman is the most used API development tool in the world today and in July Postman released a vs code extension of its tool so this means if you go to the visual studio Marketplace you can download and install this extension a day now before this release there were already two pretty popular API client tools for vs code now one is thunderclient with over 2.6 million downloads and the other one is rest client with over 3.7 million downloads So within this video I'm going to explore what this new Visual Studio code extension actually does and if it's any good we're then going to compare it to its competitors to answer the question what is the best API testing client in Visual Studio code today this is going to be very interesting just ready so we're now inside Visual Studio code I'm going to start off by looking at what this new extension offers now in order to get going with the extension go over to the marketplace Explorer and then do a search for Postman now the object or extension you want to install is called Postman and it's been created by the team which is also called Postman now after you install this extension what you'll notice is that within your solution Explorer you're going to have this icon and if you don't see it right click on your bar and just enable this option here that says Postman now click on this icon you're going to be presented with this option to either sign in using your Postman account or to create a brand new account clicking on sign in is basically going to prompt you to log into Postman in a browser so I'll do that by clicking on the open button here now as I was trying to log in I did encounter a pretty severe error and basically my Postman extension didn't load and I've got some sort of warning about a view error now in order to fix this I actually had to go into my file system to lead to my visual studio code cache then reinstall the extension and then it worked now I do want to knock the postman team at all because this extension is still in beta however if you do have installation issues then you're going to have to delete some files from your file system and the instructions on how to do that can be found in the related tutorial that I've created and the link for that is below now assume you didn't have the same sign-in issues that I did after you log in you're going to see this screen now at the top straight away you can see that we can organize all of our different requests into workspaces so potentially if you're working on different teams different projects then this will be really useful now the main use for Postman is going to be making some sort of request and we can do this on the big new HTTP request button now I think that the thing which is really Nifty with Postman is that as well as just HTTP you can see there also supports web sockets and it also supports grpc and you can also import stuff using curl so when we click on new request here you can see that we're going to get a screen which looks very similar to Classic Postman so at the top you can set the request type so we've got all the classics so you know get post all the rest API stuff and I really like that this is actually color coordinated now aside from just making requests we can also add additional data to that request so we've got some Classics so we can add in query string params we can also do things like authorization so if you need to authenticate a request we can add a bearer token or an access token if we need to we've also got the ability to add and view HTTP headers so clicking on this little button here you can see all the hidden ones then we've got the ability to attach data to the body so we can attach form data we can attach raw data like a Json request we can also do graphql if we want to and finally we also have the ability to run free and post scripts so these will be run every single time that you send a new request now after you're happy with your response you can send it off and then you can inspect the response below so you can see the body the cookies and the headers and any test results that you might have run so just in terms of making requests Postman is a solid tool and it's going to have everything you need in order to test your apis correctly jumping back into vs code let's look at some remaining capabilities this extension offers now another real important key one for me is the ability to create different environments and variables so clicking on this plus button here you can see I can create a brand new environment so let's say this is production and then within an environment I can create different variables now environments are really useful because let's say that you have a staging production and test environment and you have different access tokens shared between them being able to set up environments and having specific variables will make it much easier when you need to make requests so now I've got my production environment let's say that I go back to my request I open it up click on this one and then in the top here you can see that we've got the ability to set my environment and this is going to pull in those variables now the next capability which I think is really useful is the history tab so clicking on History you can see all the previous requests I've made double click on this and you can see I can launch a previous request click Send off we go and this saves me so much time because I always forget where I save things however I can typically remember when I've used them last so now it's probably a good time to compare what we get in vs code to the desktop version so I've logged into the PC version I think one thing I'd say is you know at the top the desktop version is definitely designed exactly for your API request so you have very specific menu items which are related to API exploring so you can see here that you know we can explore extensions plugins all that kind of good stuff now just in terms of simple comparisons you can see that in the left-hand column we can still manage workspaces so we can create new ones or import existing collections now after I've signed in I'm going to have access to all my requests I've saved against my account and you can see in the right hand side here that my request Builder looks exactly the same so I get access to all the different verbs and the rest API calls you can see that I can still add things like query stream params authorization headers the pre-request and post request scripts now one thing I did struggle a little bit was actually how do we create our websockets because clicking on the plus button here actually defaults to creating a web API request so I actually found Visual Studio code extension a little bit easier here now for me personally I was pretty impressed with the vs code extension in this comparison now yes the desktop version is more tailored to API building however not having to jump out of vs code go to the desktop version of Postman is also really useful so now that we've established that the postman based code extension is on par with its desktop equivalent let's compare it to some of its competitors I want to start off comparing it to the most popular rest client for visual studio code which is rest clients downloaded nearly 4 million times now this is a bit of a weird extension I don't personally like it too much I don't really understand why it's been used so much now with rest clients you don't get a UI you don't get a nice tab basically you can create a new file like I've got here which is example.http so basically the way that this extension works if I paste in an API request inside an HTTP file you can see I get this little button which says send request click on it is then going to give me the response of this request in text string format so here now let's say you don't want to create a file with an HTTP extension it is possible just to post your API endpoint into any old file and then if we go to the command palette do a rest client send request you can see that we can launch it anywhere now personally I've always found rest client a bit limiting and I've always used the desktop version of Postman instead however recently I have been using the second most popular rest client for visual studio and that is thunderclient so let's see how these two compare because it's actually a lot closer to get going with thunderclient again head over to the extension manager and do a search for Thunder space clones and it's this Joby here by ranga vadahini now the good news is that after install Thunder clients you do get a UI so you'll find this icon within the solution Explorer clicking on that you can see that we get our request Builder now ThunderClan isn't going to force you to log in at the beginning however you can create an account with thunderclient if you want to so you can save your collections now when it comes to requests you see we've got the big request button here this screen looks very similar to postman where we can put in our different request types put in our API URL and then we can Define headers query strings or bodies we can run post tests and pre-run scripts all that kind of good stuff now as well as creating individual requests we can add them into collections we also have the ability to create environments so very similar to postman here now just in terms of the UI I personally found Postman the winner now I definitely found things like creating an environment to be a little bit Slicker within Postman I also found it a little bit easier to touch environment variables onto a quest in Postman now in terms of functionality I'd also say that Postman wins because as well as just doing the typical rest API stuff we could also do web sockets and a grpc we can also do that importing of curl stuff as well so hands down the winner there now the final thing where it is a little bit more kind of closer is actually around pricing now for both tools they are free if you're an individual however there is a price if you're using it at a team level or in a company so for this video I've been using the individual license which means I didn't have to pay anything however if you want to use Postman and team you can see here that but the basics here is going to cost you 12 bucks per month and that is per user and then that can go up to 29 bucks per month for the professional and then we've got Enterprise and I'll let you check this page out to see all the details now if we compare this to thunderclient you can see that yep we also have a free edition however they also have a startup cost which is three bucks per month and the business tier is seven bucks per month per user and the Enterprise is only 16 bucks per month per user now you do get more features when it comes to postman however ThunderClan is definitely a little bit cheaper so with that all said and done it might a personal opinion the best API client for visual studio code is yeah it's it's Postman it's probably obvious it's Postman Postman even though it's in beta has the most amount of features it syncs with the desktop client and it's free it's pretty hard to vote if I'm honest now we're getting to that stage in the video where if you haven't already don't forget to click on subscribe and click on like if you found value from this video now I release a video every single Sunday aimed making you a better developer so what's not to love now if you are interested in learning more about Visual Studio then before you leave I've created a video all about the best extensions possible that you can install for visual studio code the link to which is on the screen right now so check that out if you want to it's a banger otherwise hope you're having a great day and happy coding

Channel: jondjones

Views: 2,154

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Id: S_juwPNwYF0

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 24 2023