Evans vs Kreya

Evans is a free universal gRPC client for manual API inspection and scripting on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its interactive REPL completes package, service, and RPC names. Stateless CLI mode reads standard input or files and prints JSON-formatted results. When server reflection is enabled, Evans can use that instead of proto files. It supports client-streaming, server-streaming, and bidirectional-streaming RPCs, plus gRPC-Web; TLS is not supported for gRPC-Web. The listed IDL and codec is Protocol Buffers 3, and the compressor is GZIP. For ordinary gRPC connections, the project documents secure TLS connections with the --tls option. Installation options include GitHub Releases, Homebrew, Docker, and Go, with Releases or Homebrew recommended for automatic updates. The documented Go installation requires Go v1.20 or later. The repeat option does not support client-streaming or bidirectional-streaming RPCs. Evans uses the MIT license.

Kreya is a desktop API client for exploring, testing, and automating API workflows on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It works with gRPC, REST, GraphQL, WebSockets, and Server-Sent Events, and can watch or import OpenAPI specifications, GraphQL schemas, and protobufs. Testing options include scripted checks and snapshot tests; its headless CLI can run in CI/CD and generate JUnit reports. Projects are kept in structured JSON intended to support Git diffs, reviews, and versioning. Kreya can import Postman and Insomnia collections, plus HAR, cURL, gRPCurl, and grpc web curl data. A reusable authentication vault covers OAuth 2.0, OIDC, Basic, API keys, mTLS, AWS SigV4, Kerberos, NTLM, and JWT Profile. The maker says app data stays on the device, while its privacy policy says the app and CLI collect anonymized telemetry. There is a free plan; Pro is $5 a month. Secret manager integration is marked as coming soon.