When comparing Homebrew vs Postman, the Slant community recommends Homebrew for most people. In the question“What are the best developer tools for Mac OSX?” Homebrew is ranked 1st while Postman is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Homebrew is:
Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Quick access to a large repository of open source software
Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.
Pro Easy to setup and use
Once installed, you control Homebrew using the brew command. You can find packages using brew search, install them using brew install and remove them using brew uninstall.
Pro Open Source
Pro Less maintenance than Macports
Macports seems to be able to get into a bad state where new packages are unable to be installed, or installed software was unable to be updated. This simply hasn't happened with Homebrew. In addition to not having to deal with corruption problems, Homebrew installs packages in userland. Not requiring root to install software is a big win.
Pro Builds quickly and requires few dependencies
Homebrew as much as possible uses already existing libraries and tools to install software thus making builds quick and requiring few dependencies.
Pro Unintrusive
Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local
. Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like.
Pro Does not require using sudo
One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo
most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on.
Pro Homebrew tries very hard to use existing tools and libraries
Homebrew’s recipes try very hard to use the existing tools and libraries in OS/X, so they tend to build much faster and require fewer dependent libraries.
Pro Free
Pro Flexible and powerful
Can easily add/remove parameters, headers, tests and more. Displays all the info you would want in a partitioned way so you can track exactly what you want. Able to save request and run them in bulk for testing real-user scenarios very efficiently.
Pro Clear interface
The interface of the program is clean and intuitive. Almost all features are accessible through a single click.
Pro Two versions of apps are available
Packaged app and an in-browser app are available for Google Chrome.
Pro Excellent user feedback loop
Postman is very responsive to users and listens to user feedback.
Pro Dark theme
Cons
Con May cause issues when trying to create symlinks or installing in places where SIP has changed permissions
One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo
most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on. (Alternatively, you could install Homebrew somewhere other than /usr/local
, but that might break various packages that depend on having stuff in and relative to /usr/local/
.)
Con Command line tools for XCode required
Once xcode is installed you can install Homebrew, including new(er)/different versions of most of the build stuff that xcode-select installed, like a newer gcc, newer git, etc.
Con Relies on outdated system libs
Con Version 8.x killed Postman - some problem related to "Teams"
Postman is forcing everybody to move their data to the cloud.
Con Insecure off-premise storage
To properly use this with full development and testing it stores API details, including security, in an off-site storage managed by Postman. It also stores details about employees, teams they are members of, and projects they are working on.
This makes it inappropriate for any organization that is required to exercise a high level of security hygiene when developing software products. This issue may be compounded by the lack of details concerning the geolocation of data storage.
Con Proprietary, closed source software
Not free and open source.
Con Resource hog
Con Bloated & cluttered
Bloated and cluttered, it's quicker to just have a js/ts template available to run some requests.