head to head · open source
Bruno vs portman
Bruno has 47,992 GitHub stars, 3,068 forks, 1,831 open issues and last shipped yesterday. portman has 685 stars, 63 forks, 56 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. Bruno leads on adoption by 6,906% (47,992 vs 685 stars). Bruno is written in JavaScript under MIT; portman is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. Bruno has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, portman 9%. Bruno was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (api-testing, openapi), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Bruno | portman | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 685 |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | JavaScript | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-31 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 63 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Bruno if
- You weight community size — 48K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick portman if
- You want the portman feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and portman fits your workflow better
About Bruno
Bruno Opensource IDE for exploring and testing APIs. English Українська Русский Türkçe Deutsch Français Português (BR) 한국어 বাংলা Español Italiano Română Polski 简体中文 正體中文 العربية 日本語 ქართული Nederlands فارسی Bruno is a new and innovative API client, aimed at revolutionizing the status quo represented by Postman and similar tools out there. Bruno stores your collections directly in a folder on your filesystem. We use a plain text markup language, Bru, to save information about API requests. You can use Git or any version control of your choice to collaborate over your API collections. Bruno is offline only. There…
read the full Bruno overview →
About portman
Portman 👨🏽🚀 Port OpenAPI Spec to Postman Collection, with contract & variation tests included! Portman leverages OpenAPI documents, with all its defined API request/response properties, to power your Postman collection. Let Portman do all the work and inject contract & variation tests with a minimum of configuration. Customize the Postman requests & variables with a wide range of options to assign & overwrite variables. [!IMPORTANT] Important Change: If you are using version 1.28.0 with a custom Postman config file specified by the postmanConfigFile flag, please ensure that the parametersResolution option is…
read the full portman overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Bruno or portman more popular?
Bruno has 47,992 GitHub stars and portman has 685. Bruno has the larger community by that measure.
Are Bruno and portman free?
Both are open source. Bruno is licensed under MIT and portman under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Bruno and portman?
Bruno is written in JavaScript and portman in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Bruno or portman?
Choose Bruno if you want the larger community (47,992 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose portman if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.