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Requestly
Requestly is a local-first Postman alternative for testing REST, GraphQL, and gRPC APIs with Git-based collection sync and zero mandatory cloud login.
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Overview
An engineering team testing internal payment microservices cannot upload customer schemas or tokens to an external cloud workspace. Storing sensitive endpoints and regression collections in local Git repositories prevents third-party data leakage while keeping API definitions version-controlled alongside code. Requestly provides a local-first workspace for crafting, debugging, and executing API calls across development environments without mandatory account sign-in.
Why Requestly instead of Postman
Postman shifted its primary experience to a cloud-synchronized model where collections, variables, and authentication tokens reside on remote servers by default. Teams working under strict compliance boundaries or behind air-gapped corporate networks face security reviews before engineers can share request collections. Requestly handles request building, multi-protocol testing across REST, GraphQL, and gRPC, and environment variable substitution directly on the developer machine. By persisting workspace collections into plain filesystem files tracked by Git, access control stays within internal repository permissions rather than third-party SaaS tenants.
The workflow divergence centers on governance and network isolation. Postman bundles cloud-hosted monitors, team workspaces, mock servers, and public API registries, but that surface area brings mandatory account logins and per-seat fees. Requestly minimizes friction by allowing immediate request dispatching without an account. It also connects API testing with browser traffic manipulation through its companion interceptor extension. However, teams migrating away from Postman lose automated cloud schedule runners and public documentation portals, requiring internal CI pipelines to handle unattended collection runs.
What it does well
- Git-based collection sync: Stores requests and folder hierarchies as local files so teams review API changes through standard pull requests.
- Multi-protocol testing: Dispatches calls across REST, GraphQL with introspection, gRPC, WebSocket, Socket.IO, and MQTT from a unified interface.
- Offline-first execution: Dispatches requests against localhost and staging endpoints immediately without registration or external network access.
- Postman and OpenAPI migration: Ingests existing Postman collections, environments, and OpenAPI contracts with variable mappings preserved.
