Best Hurl Alternatives

Open-source API client for testing REST, GraphQL, and gRPC APIs as a lightweight, privacy-focused alternative to Postman. Stores API collections as plain files in your Git repository for easy version control and team collaboration. Features environment variables, scripting, collection runner, and a declarative syntax called Bru. Offline-first with no cloud account required. Available on macOS, Windows, and Linux. 44K+ GitHub stars and growing rapidly among developers leaving Postman.

Open-source API client by Kong for designing, debugging, and testing REST, GraphQL, gRPC, and WebSocket APIs. Features a clean interface with environment variables, authentication helpers, code generation, cookie management, and response timeline. Supports OpenAPI and Swagger specs for design-first workflows. Git Sync for version-controlled API collections. Available on macOS, Windows, and Linux. A popular alternative to Postman with stronger focus on privacy and local-first usage.

k6 is an open-source load testing and performance testing tool developed by Grafana Labs. Developers write performance tests in JavaScript and execute them on a high-performance Go runtime capable of generating thousands of virtual users per machine. Features a CLI-first workflow, cloud-based test execution, and integrations with Grafana dashboards — making performance testing as accessible as writing unit tests.

Checkly is an active reliability platform for developers and agents that combines Playwright browser checks, API checks, synthetic monitoring, monitoring-as-code, traces, status pages, alerts, and Rocky AI analysis. It helps teams run code-defined production checks from global and private locations instead of relying only on pre-deploy tests.