// the take
Insomnia is Kong's Electron-based GUI API client for REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSockets and SSE, aimed at developers who want a Postman-style tool for testing and designing APIs with optional Git-based sync instead of mandatory cloud storage.
Genuinely multi-protocol (gRPC and WebSocket support is still rarer among competitors), the monorepo is well organized into separate packages (insomnia-data, insomnia-api, insomnia-inso CLI) with real test coverage, and Git Sync gives you an actual non-cloud collaboration path instead of forcing everything through a vendor account.
It now requires an account for most meaningful functionality, which is a hard sell for anyone who picked this repo specifically to avoid Postman's cloud-lock-in model, and the free Scratch Pad is clearly a secondary, crippled experience relative to the account-gated product. The codebase is heavy (Electron + large monorepo) so local dev setup and build times are not trivial, and the README is mostly business/pricing framing rather than technical depth on architecture or plugin APIs.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →