Apache APISIX vs Postman

Apache APISIX is a free, Apache 2.0-licensed, self-hosted gateway for routing, securing and managing API, microservice and LLM traffic. It runs on bare metal or Kubernetes and supports HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, UDP, WebSocket, gRPC, MQTT, HTTP/3 and Dubbo, with HTTP-to-gRPC transcoding. More than 100 open-source plugins cover traffic management, security, observability and protocol handling. The project provides authentication options including API keys, JWT, Basic Authentication, OAuth 2.0/OpenID Connect, HMAC, LDAP, CAS, Keycloak, Casdoor, forward authentication and multi-auth, along with rate limiting and request transformation. Its NGINX-and-etcd architecture uses hot-reloadable plugins and distributes cluster configuration without restarts. AI gateway functions include multi-provider proxying, load balancing, retries, fallback, token limits, prompt security and transformation. Listed integrations include Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, Redis, OpenAI, Anthropic and AWS Bedrock. Official source releases include detached signatures and SHA-512 checksums.

Postman is a platform for building, exercising, sharing, documenting, and monitoring APIs. Its API client handles multiple protocols and includes authentication, response inspection and visualization, variables, environments, and request history. For API design, it supports specifications, mock servers, importing definitions, multiple definition formats, and third-party integrations. Testing options include collection runs and automated, integration, performance, regression, and end-to-end testing, with Postman CLI also available. Listed integrations include Jira, Slack, GitHub, GitLab, Microsoft Teams, VS Code, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Secrets Manager, and 1Password Vault. Postman describes local secret protection, cloud detection, runtime resolution, and connections to secret-management services. Its stated compliance credentials include SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and others. It says customer data is not used to train its models and Enterprise teams control AI access and usage. The Free plan includes 50 AI credits. Solo is $9 a month, billed annually. Basic and Professional plans are closed to new customers; existing Professional customers retain their current plan and pricing.