Software Alternatives & Reviews

netcat VS Postman

Compare netcat VS Postman and see what are their differences

netcat logo netcat

Netcat is a featured networking utility which reads and writes data across network connections...

Postman logo Postman

The Collaboration Platform for API Development
  • netcat Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-11-19
  • Postman Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-07-23

netcat videos

Linux Terminal 101: Netcat

More videos:

  • Review - Advanced Netcat and TCP Fun - Hak5 1922
  • Review - Netcat 101: Remote Shells in Windows, HakTip 86

Postman videos

POST/CON 2018 workshop in review: Running Postman Collections

More videos:

  • Review - POST/CON 2018 workshop in review: Postman Collections
  • Tutorial - How to Share Postman Collections

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to netcat and Postman)
Monitoring Tools
35 35%
65% 65
API Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Log Management
100 100%
0% 0
APIs
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare netcat and Postman

netcat Reviews

9 Best Angry IP Scanner Alternatives Reviewed 2021 (Free & Paid)
Netcat lacks a lot of the documentation you can easily find with software like AngryIP or Nmap which in my opinion is its biggest drawback. If you’re thinking about trying out Netcat, check out our Netcat Cheat Sheet to quickly pull up powerful and useful commands. Netcat is compatible with Windows, Linux, and macOS systems.
Top 5 Best Port Scanners
Netcat is one of the oldest network tools in the "Unixverse", it's been there since 1995, and the last official version is from 2004. Although it has many forks and variants that work pretty well on modern operating systems, like ncat from the Nmap suite, or this alternative Netcat version from Mike Frysinger.

Postman Reviews

Beeceptor vs Postman
You cannot download request log. Although, you can use Postman APIs to query and retrieve.
Source: beeceptor.com
Top 15 MuleSoft Competitors and Alternatives
Postman is an API platform with the world’s largest public API hub that helps developers design, build, test, and iterate APIs. In 2022, Postman served over 20 million developers and 500,000 organizations.
Top 10 HTTP Client and Web Debugging Proxy Tools (2023)
Are you a developer thrilled with APIs? Then Postman HTTP client and web debugging proxy tool is for you. Now why is this even a choice to use? Postman is ultimately one of the platforms that do anything APIs. It builds, organizes APIs, tests, monitors, documents, and most of all debugs web applications.
12 HTTP Client and Web Debugging Proxy Tools
Postman is unarguably one of the more popular HTTP clients used for debugging web applications. It allows for faster and easier API development.
Source: geekflare.com
Best API Monitoring and Observability Tools in 2023
Postman free plan: Provides a maximum of 1000 calls to Postman API, Mock server calls, and monitoring API calls. Pricing starts at $12/month for the paid plan.
Source: apitoolkit.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Postman should be more popular than netcat. It has been mentiond 27 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

netcat mentions (7)

  • could not connect to the rhel-9 from putty in windows machine
    If you don't like using telnet, that's fine. Don't use it. There are plenty of other options available. Use netcat. Or use netcat. Or use netcat. Or read and write directly to /dev/tcp/hostname/port using shell constructs. Or run openssl s_client if you suspect something complicated is listening on the other end. There is more than one way to do it and ways that are not your way still work. Source: 11 months ago
  • The HTTP crash course nobody asked for
    Reminder, there are many different netcats, here are some of the most commons: - netcat-traditional http://www.stearns.org/nc/ - netcat-openbsd : https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/usr.bin/nc/netcat.c (also packaged in Debian) - ncat https://nmap.org/ncat/ - netcat GNU: https://netcat.sourceforge.net/ (quite rare) To prevent any confusion, I like to recommend socat: http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Gaining remote access to a computer with a reverse shell attack in Node.js
    A common tool to execute a reverse shell is called netcat. If you're using macOS, it should be installed by default. You can check by running nc -help in a terminal window. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Programm to send and receive TCP/UDP Packets
    You could try using Ncat on Windows or netcat on Linux, though it's a command-line only tool if that matters. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Is there a way to copy a file from a remote shell to local without using scp?
    If you have netcat, you can easily set up a transfer from one machine to the other:. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

Postman mentions (27)

  • How to use ApyHub to Build a Serverless Function in NodeJs?
    Once deployed, thoroughly test your serverless function to confirm it behaves as expected. Invoke the function manually from the cloud platform’s console or use tools like Postman, Apidog, or Fusion ( Fusion is ApyHub’s own API Client ) to test HTTP-triggered functions. Ensure the function executes correctly and handles errors gracefully. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Mastering Microservices: A Hands-On Tutorial with Node.js, RabbitMQ, Nginx, and Docker
    To test the API endpoints, you can use Postman. Download and install Postman from Postman's official website. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    Postman — Simplify workflows and create better APIs – faster – with Postman, a collaboration platform for API development. Use the Postman App for free forever. Postman cloud features are also free forever with certain limits. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • How I Built A Santa Chatbot To Mess With My Brother
    The API tests were dirt simple. I use the SAM CLI to build and deploy my cloud resources to AWS. So when I was building the API, I would deploy to my account using the CLI in VS Code, then immediately run a collection in Postman using their VS Code extension. I never had to leave my IDE and could run a full end-to-end workflow within seconds of my deployment being complete. All I had to do was switch tabs to my... - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Are you kidding me?
    I had the network guys opening up for getpostman.com and postman.com because it said so when trying to log in to Postman. And just when I click login it jumps to postman.co just forgetting the m. Are you kidding me? Who came up with this? You probably cost me this days work. Source: 5 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing netcat and Postman, you can also consider the following products

Wireshark - Wireshark is a network protocol analyzer for Unix and Windows. It lets you capture and interactively browse the traffic running on a computer network.

Insomnia REST - The most intuitive cross-platform REST API Client 😴

tcpdump - tcpdump is a common packet analyzer that runs under the command line.

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform - Anypoint Platform is a unified, highly productive, hybrid integration platform that creates an application network of apps, data and devices with API-led connectivity.

socat - socat is a relay for bidirectional data transfer between two independent data channels.

DreamFactory - DreamFactory is an API management platform used to generate, secure, document, and extend APIs.