Bruno vs Hurl

Bruno is a Git-native client for exploring and testing APIs, supporting REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and WebSocket protocols. API collections are plain-text files kept in project repositories, where teams can version and review them with Git. Testing tools include assertions, scripts, collection automation, scheduled runs, and CI/CD integration. Users can create and switch between environments, use variables, and run JavaScript before requests or after responses. Bruno offers a desktop client, CLI, IDE extension, API documentation generator, and mock server using the same collection format. Collections can become interactive HTML documentation with code samples and a live playground. Collections, environments, and secrets remain on the user's device; Bruno says project data is not sent to its cloud. However, a startup HTTPS license check sends an IP address, license key, hashed device ID, and Bruno version. The free Open Source plan includes two workspaces and five OpenAPI syncs per month. Pro is $6 a month billed annually, and Ultimate is $11 a month billed annually. A 14-day Ultimate trial is available without a credit card.

Hurl is a command-line tool for running HTTP requests written in a plain-text format. It can fetch data or test HTTP sessions, including flows where later requests use values captured earlier. It can evaluate queries against response headers and bodies. Hurl works with HTML, REST, SOAP, GraphQL, XML, and JSON APIs, and examples cover assertions for status, headers, cookies, XPath, JSONPath, response duration, and SHA-256 body hashes. For CI/CD, it can produce text, JUnit, TAP, and HTML reports; its documentation covers GitHub Actions and GitLab CI/CD. The lightweight binary is written in Rust, with an HTTP engine powered by libcurl. Installation options include binaries or packages for Linux, macOS, and Windows, as well as Docker, Cargo, conda-forge, and npm. The precompiled Linux binary requires libc 2.35 or newer. Windows installation requires a separately installed Visual C++ Redistributable Package. Hurl is free under the Apache License, Version 2.0.