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The 5 Best API Testing Tools You Should Know About
APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are indispensable for communication between different services and applications – the lifeblood of modern software systems. Having reliable, performant, and, more importantly, secure APIs is a development team’s priority. These tools have become invaluable assets for developers and QA professionals to automate testing, validate functionality, and verify the robustness of APIs. So, let’s go through these five best API testing tools.
What is API Testing?API Testing is a software testing process that focuses on verifying the functionality of API(Application Programming Interface). This API testing includes endpoints, data exchange – input & output behavior and performance, etc. In software design, APIs are essential to making different software components communicate with each other and can be measured as evolutionary building blocks that facilitate modern-day- applications. API testing ensures that the communication pathways are reliable and performable.
Best API Testing ToolsHere are the top 5 API Testing Tools at your service.
PostmanPostman is a versatile and popular API testing tool widely used by developers, testers, and API consumers. It has various features that help build, test, and document APIs. Let’s see these features.
Postman: Features- It has a user-friendly interface, thereby simplifying the process of sending HTTP requests.
- With the help of Postman, you can create and manage environments with different sets of variables that are helpful in API testing.
- It supports many authentication methods, including OAuth, API Key, and Basic Auth. Moreover, it also supports pre-requests and test scripts written in JavaScript.
Postman: Pricing
There are four plans that Postman offers which are:
- Free: Ideal for individuals and small teams of 3, this free plan includes access to API clients and flows, 25 collection runs to test the functionality of your API, 30-day collection recovery, and 50 free activities in Postbot.
- Basic: The price of this plan is $14 per user/month that is billed annually. You will get cloud-based integrations, 10000 mock server requests, additional pay-as-you-go capabilities, and all the Free plan features.
- Professional: This plan will cost you $29 per user/month, billed annually. The features include essential role-based access control, 25 packages, 90 days of collection recovery, and private workspaces.
- Enterprise: This plan is available at $49 per user/month and is ideal for large organizations. It includes everything in the Professional plan plus a private API network. SSO, SCIM & SAML, reporting & analytics, audit logs, and advanced role-based access control.
One of the great Java libraries, REST Assured, tests RESTful web services. Offering a domain-specific language (DSL) that enables developers to construct transparent and manageable test code streamlines the process of building tests for APIs. When testing REST APIs to make sure they function as intended, REST Assured is frequently utilized.
REST Assured: Features- REST Assured has a user-friendly interface and supports various HTTP methods like GET, PUT, DELETE, PATCH, and POST.
- It offers functions like checking status codes, validating responses, and responding to body contents. It can handle JSON and XML response formats, which are prevalent in today’s APIs.
- In addition to supporting authentication mechanisms like OAuth, REST Assured seamlessly integrates Java testing frameworks like TestNG.
REST Assured: Pricing
As REST Assured is an open-source library, it is free of cost, making it a widely popular choice among software organizations.
Try REST Assured SoapUIThe cross-platform, open-source testing tool SoapUI primarily aims to test REST and SOAP online services. It supports SOAP and RESTful APIs and is extensively used for functional, regression, and load-testing web services. SoapUI is accessible to technical and non-technical users since it offers a graphical user interface (GUI) that enables users to write and run tests without requiring substantial programming knowledge.
SoapUI: Features
- SoapUI offers security testing features, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting, to identify vulnerabilities in web services.
- It allows users to execute test cases with multiple data sets which helps for testing the same API functionality with different inputs.
- SoapUI supports importing WSDL files for SOAP services and can integrate with tools like Jenkins.
SoapUI offers its services as an Open Source and Pro product. Open source is a free service that is available to every individual. However, the Pro products, which consist of ReadyAPI and TestEngine, will cost you depending on your requirements and the scale of use.
Try SoapUI KatalonKatalon provides an all-in-one API testing toolkit that helps enhance your projects with seamless data access and utilization from API responses. It enables streamlined integration across UI automation and database validation and injects crafts API tests within minutes.
Katalon: Features- Katalon supercharges API testing with faster execution and frees your team for impactful testing, accelerating your release cycles. It supports all API architectural styles like SOAP, REST, and GraphQL.
- It streamlines the development pipeline with seamless CI/CD integration, ensuring quality on every code change.
- Katalon ensures excellent test coverage through its AI-driven insights, extensive tests, and many other testing scenarios.
Katalon: Pricing
There are three plans to choose from:
- Free: In this plan, you get free studio and recorder services, including essential execution and reporting features, API test automation, and basic low-code.
- Premium: Costing $175 per user/month, this plan is ideal for teams of any size for easy and advanced test creation, bugging, and reporting.
- Ultimate: This plan is exclusive for enterprise-scale, so you need to talk to sales about the pricing schedule.
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KarateKarate is one of the open-source tools that even non-programmers can use. It combines API test automation, API mocks, and API performance testing into one unified framework, making it well-suited to combat challenges.
Karate: Features- It supports various HTTPS calls, including SOAP, XXL, SSL, HTTP proxy server support, URL-encoded HTML-form data, and many others.
- Karate uses plain-text scripts based on the Cucumber/Gherkin standard with IDE support and syntax-coloring options.
- It has a standard Java/ Maven project structure, seamless integration into CI/CD pipelines, and support for JUnit 5.
Karate: Pricing
You get five pricing schedules to choose from that are as follows:
- Open-source: It is a free plan and you can get features like API testing, API performance testing, API mocks, and few more.
- Plus: This plan is $100/year, and every feature is available in the free plan. The additional features include core syntax support, code formatting, HTTP APIs, embedded JSON/JS support, and many others.
- Pro: The price of the Pro plan is $640/year. In addition to the features available in the Plus plan, you can also do code folding, debus & step-through, async API testing, and have JSON reformatting shortcuts.
- Ultimate: By paying $1400/year, you can covert API specifications to Karate tests, import OpenAPI definitions, customize the sequence of API calls, and make exploratory API calls directly from OpenAPI or Swagger specs.
- Enterprise: This is an exclusive plan in which you get a customer admin portal for license management, SAML SSO, offline license activation, and no code API workflow builder. Hence, contact Sales to get this plan.
Selecting a suitable API testing tool must be considered when validating APIs’ reliability, performance, and security constraints. Postman, SoapUI, REST Assured, Karate, and Katalon are some of the best tools available for API testing. With this stack, end-to-end teams can use proven tools to verify the robustness, reliability, and performance characteristics they want from their APIs, creating an optimal experience for both users and clients.