Postman Alternatives: Every Free Tier Withholds a Different Thing
Bruno's free tier cannot use a private Git repository, which is the entire point of Bruno. Insomnia's free Git Sync stops at three users. Hoppscotch withholds the least and runs in a browser. What each one costs once the free tier stops fitting.
Postman’s Free and Solo plans include exactly one user. That is on their pricing page as a line item, “Total users included: 1 user,” and it is why a wave of teams went shopping this year. Team is $19 per user per month billed annually, which is $1,140 a year for five people who used to pay nothing.
Three alternatives get named in every thread about this, and all three have free tiers. The useful question is not whether they are free but which part of the product each one holds back, because it is a different part in each case, and in one of them it is the feature the product is famous for. Prices below came off the vendor pricing pages and the GitHub API on 23 August 2026.
Bruno: the free tier cannot see a private repository
Bruno stores collections as .bru files on disk, one file per request, so the collection folder goes in your repo and Git does the collaboration Postman charges for. Branch, push, review the diff, merge. When someone changes an auth header, it shows up in the pull request instead of drifting inside somebody’s local install.
That is a genuinely better model, and the free tier does not fully support it. Bruno’s pricing table lists Git Providers as Public on Open Source and Public + Private on Pro and Ultimate. Workspaces are capped at 2, and OpenAPI syncs at 5 a month. So if your API collections live in a private GitHub repo, which is the normal case for anything commercial, the git-native workflow starts at Pro, $6 per user per month billed annually. Ultimate is $11 and adds SSO, SCIM, audit logs and a 24-hour support SLA.
Six dollars against Postman’s nineteen is still a good trade. It is just not the “free, full stop” that most write-ups describe, and the gap sits exactly where the product’s reputation is.
The CLI is the part that needs no qualification: Bruno CLI produces JSON, JUnit and HTML reports, so dropping it into an existing pipeline is a command swap rather than a rewrite. And because the collections are already checked in, the CI job reads what is in the repo instead of exporting from a cloud workspace first. That removes a whole category of stale-collection bugs.
Insomnia: free, with the sync capped at three
Kong’s Insomnia gives away more than people expect. Essentials is $0 with unlimited cloud and local projects for all users, the inso CLI for CI, unlimited collection runs, end-to-end encryption, custom linting, and 1,000 mock server requests a month. The catch is one line: Git Sync projects for up to 3 users. Cloud storage for everyone, Git storage for three.
Pro is $12 per user per month and lifts that to unlimited users on Git Sync, adds RBAC and unlimited organizations, and raises mock requests to 10,000. Enterprise is $45 per user, self-serve up to 50 users, and is where SSO, SCIM, storage-location mandates and vault integrations live. Mock request overage is $10 per 25,000 on either paid plan.
For a team whose complaint is “we lost free multi-user sync,” Essentials may end the search without a migration at all, provided you are content with cloud projects rather than Git ones.
Hoppscotch: the least withheld, and it runs in a tab
Hoppscotch’s free plan is unlimited workspaces, collections, requests and runners, with community support. The paid Organization plan is $6 per user per month billed annually and adds an admin dashboard, dedicated support and custom payment terms. There is a self-hosted Community Edition, and an Enterprise Edition for on-premises deployment.
It is MIT licensed and, at 80,000 GitHub stars, the most starred of the three by a wide margin. The trade is depth: scripting and complex auth flows are thinner than Postman’s or Bruno’s. If your collections lean on chained OAuth2 with custom refresh logic or heavy pre-request scripting, expect to rewrite a meaningful chunk of it by hand.
What it costs once the free tier stops fitting
Per user per month on annual billing, and then at three team sizes.
| Rate | 5 seats | 20 seats | 50 seats | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bruno Pro | $6 | $30 | $120 | $300 |
| Hoppscotch Organization | $6 | $30 | $120 | $300 |
| Bruno Ultimate | $11 | $55 | $220 | $550 |
| Insomnia Pro | $12 | $60 | $240 | $600 |
| Postman Team | $19 | $95 | $380 | $950 |
| Insomnia Enterprise | $45 | $225 | $900 | $2,250 |
| Postman Enterprise | $49 | $245 | $980 | $2,450 |
Two add-ons distort the Postman column further. SSO is $6 per user per month on top, and it is an organization-level add-on that has to be enabled for every licensed user, so a Team plan with SSO is effectively $25. The Advanced Security add-on is $29 per user per month and is Enterprise only. Postman AI credits are metered separately, with overage at $0.035 to $0.05 per credit depending on plan.
If SSO is a requirement, compare the real rows: Postman Team plus SSO at $25, Bruno Ultimate at $11, Insomnia Enterprise at $45.
All three are alive, which is not nothing
| License | Stars | Last commit | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hoppscotch | MIT | 80,079 | this week |
| Bruno | MIT | 46,484 | this week |
| Insomnia | Apache-2.0 | 39,958 | this week |
No BSL, no SSPL, no source-available asterisk on any of the three, which is unusual for a category this commercially contested. The paid tiers sell hosted collaboration, admin and support rather than the client itself.
What actually costs you time in the migration
Not the pricing decision. The scripts.
Every one of these imports Postman collections, and every one of them handles requests, folders and environments fine. What does not survive is logic written against Postman’s pm.* API in pre-request and test scripts, because each tool has its own execution context. Teams consistently have more of that accumulated than they remember, and it is the part nobody budgets for.
CI is the easy half. If your pipeline runs Newman today, the contract you depend on is a command that reads a collection, writes a report and exits non-zero on failure, and both bru and inso meet it. You can also keep Newman running against exported collections during a transition rather than changing both things in the same week.
Before any of it, spend five minutes on your own usage. How many people are genuinely in the workspace, whether anyone uses the mock servers or the documentation generator, and how much scripting is in there. If the answer is three people and forty simple requests, the migration is an afternoon and the free tier of any of the three will hold it. If the answer includes a hundred scripted assertions, the tool choice matters less than who is rewriting them.