Postman vs. SmartBear
Break free from the complexity of SmartBear's fragmented solution and support approach with Postman's unified solution and partnership.
Why Postman?
Unlike SmartBear’s fragmented infrastructure, consisting of different interfaces across different underlying products, Postman's purpose-built solution streamlines the entire API development lifecycle in one unified workspace, enables faster development velocity and team collaboration, and balances developer-friendly interfaces with enterprise-grade governance, making it the trusted choice for both developers and enterprises.
See how it stacks up against SmartBear's products for API design, documentation, and more.
Integrated API lifecycle support
Unified platform for the entire API lifecycle
Broad format & protocol support
Complete lifecycle capabilities
Single, unified workspace
One-click lifecycle transitions
Fragmented bag of tools
Over 12 acquired products
Customers consistently swivel across products like SwaggerHub and ReadyAPI, causing risk & inefficiency
SmartBear doesn’t support RAML, GraphQL, Protobuf, SOAP / WSDL across their products consistently, which means that SmartBear’s formats and protocol supports are limited
The new API Hub has 5 different unintegrated interfaces across 3 underlying products: SwaggerHub, Reflect, and Pactflow
The new API Hub doesn’t support load and performance testing capabilities
The new API Hub is missing certain monitoring capabilities, such as real time API observability
Team efficiency & collaboration
Built for development velocity & alignment
End-to-end collaboration
Clear accountability through user tagging
Deep integrations with Slack & Teams
Flexible workspace permissions including stringent access controls, team collaboration, and public sharing
Siloed workflows & communication
Basic collaboration limited to design
No user tagging, which means limited accountability & assignment
No out-of-the-box Slack or Teams integrations in SwaggerHub or Reflect
API Hub does not have an API public distribution network to share API artifacts publicly
Limited workspace permissions & no external sharing
Easy to use & scale
Starts with developers, scales to the enterprise
Intuitive user experience
Built-in AI assistance via Postbot
Most widely adopted by developers
Largest public API network & ecosystem
Enterprise-grade security & governance
Comprehensive technical product support
Engaged customer community
Complex to use, govern, & scale
Unintuitive user experience
Administration siloed across 5 interfaces
Redundant integration points are not shared between SwaggerHub and Reflect in the new API Hub, which may require multiple integration setup points
AI assistance in specific products
No public API network
Total cost of ownership
Lowest total cost of ownership
For $49 - $215 per user/month
You get:
Complete lifecycle (design, test, document, monitor, distribute)
Deep partner collaboration
Advanced security & governance
API / AI application building
AI assistance
SmartBear’s Enterprise offerings are expensive to license, maintain, & scale
For $49-121+ per user / month (quote-based)
You get (API Hub formerly SwaggerHub):
Design
Basic testing
Documentation
AI Assistance via HaloAI
No load & performance testing
No monitoring
No public API network distribution
No API / AI application building
For an additional $762+ per user / month (quote-based), you'll also get:
Load & performance testing (ReadyAPI from $762 user / month)
Monitoring (AlertSite Monitoring - custom pricing)
In addition, when choosing an API testing solution, customers may need to consider the general costs to onboard their users to multiple interfaces, maintain integrations, and the ability for vendors to support across the breadth and depth of their solutions.
Challenge: Organizations are struggling with fragmented API development processes that lack cohesive integration across the entire lifecycle, from design to deployment and management.
Why Postman: Postman unifies API design, testing, documentation, and monitoring into one seamless platform, eliminating tool sprawl and misalignment.
With Postman, you get:
- Full lifecycle capability coverage, from design and mocking to testing and observability
- Everything in a single, unified workspace
- Seamless one-click transitions between lifecycle stages
- Support for multiple formats & protocols like OpenAPI, Async, GraphQL, gRPC, SOAP, RAML and REST
SmartBear considerations: SmartBear’s API Hub solution is incomplete without purchasing additional, separate SmartBear products like ReadyAPI and Alertsite.
Why teams choose Postman
These are the most common questions we hear from teams evaluating Postman as a modern API platform:
Is Postman more than just an API testing tool?
Yes. Postman supports the entire API lifecycle—including design, mocking, testing, documentation, publishing, monitoring, and governance—all in one platform.
What makes Postman different from SmartBear's products?
Postman is unified. SmartBear splits lifecycle features across multiple tools (SwaggerHub, PactFlow, Reflect, ReadyAPI, LoadNinja, Alertsite, etc.), while Postman provides an integrated experience that improves development speed, collaboration, and cost-efficiency.
Does Postman scale for large enterprise API programs?
Absolutely. Postman offers enterprise-grade governance, security (SSO, RBAC, BYOK), and support—all while maintaining a developer-friendly interface used by 30M+ developers. It's the reason why 98% of the Fortune 500 uses Postman.
What kind of ROI can teams expect with Postman?
Real results. On average, customers report 52% faster release cycles, 77% higher quality APIs, and 46% lower total cost of ownership by moving away from SmartBear products like API Hub (formerly SwaggerHub), consolidating tools and automating workflows on Postman.
Postman is trusted by over 500,000 companies, 40 million users, and 98% of the Fortune 500
