head to head · open source
Insomnia vs cli-printing-press
Insomnia has 40,111 GitHub stars, 2,388 forks, 874 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cli-printing-press has 4,903 stars, 533 forks, 65 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Insomnia leads on adoption by 718% (40,111 vs 4,903 stars). Insomnia is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0; cli-printing-press is written in Go under MIT. Insomnia has attracted 6% as many forks as stars, cli-printing-press 11%. cli-printing-press was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| Insomnia | cli-printing-press | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 40K | ★ 4.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | TypeScript | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.4K | ⑂ 533 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Insomnia if
- You weight community size — 40K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cli-printing-press if
- You want the cli-printing-press feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and cli-printing-press fits your workflow better
About Insomnia
Insomnia API Client Insomnia is an open source, cross platform API client for GraphQL, REST, WebSockets, Server Sent Events (SSE), gRPC and any other HTTP compatible protocol. With Insomnia you can: Debug APIs using the most popular protocols and formats. Design APIs using the native OpenAPI editor and visual preview. Test APIs using native test suites and collection runner. Mock APIs using a cloud or self hosted mocking server. Build CI/CD pipelines using the native Insomnia CLI for linting and testing. Collaborate with others using the many collaboration features. And more including the ability to use 3rd…
read the full Insomnia overview →
About cli-printing-press
CLI Printing Press Nothing is more valuable than time and money. In a world of AI agents, that's speed and token spend. A well designed CLI is muscle memory for an agent: no hunting through docs, no wrong turns, no wasted tokens. We built the Printing Press to print the best CLIs in the world for agents. It reads the official API docs, studies every popular community CLI and MCP server, sniffs the web for the APIs nobody published (think Google Flights or Dominos), and applies the power user playbook Peter Steinberger proved with discrawl and gogcli local SQLite, compound commands, agent native flags. It fuses…
read the full cli-printing-press overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Insomnia or cli-printing-press more popular?
Insomnia has 40,111 GitHub stars and cli-printing-press has 4,903. Insomnia has the larger community by that measure.
Are Insomnia and cli-printing-press free?
Both are open source. Insomnia is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cli-printing-press under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Insomnia and cli-printing-press?
Insomnia is written in TypeScript and cli-printing-press in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Insomnia or cli-printing-press?
Choose Insomnia if you want the larger community (40,111 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cli-printing-press if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.