Curlex vs Postman vs Bruno

There are three major desktop API clients right now: Postman, Bruno, and Curlex. Each makes different trade-offs. This page breaks down exactly what each tool supports so you can decide which one is the right fit for how you work.

Key:

Philosophy and Architecture

The most fundamental difference between these tools is not in their feature lists — it is in their underlying approach to where your data lives and how much you have to trust the vendor.

What this means in practice:

• Postman requires a cloud account and synchronises your collections to Postman's servers. If you have concerns about sending your API endpoint structure, credentials, or test data to a third party, this matters.
• Bruno stores every request as a plain text file on your disk. This makes it easy to commit collections alongside your code in Git.
• Curlex stores everything locally in a database inside the app, with optional push to any Git remote you choose.

Protocol Support

Authentication

Building Requests

Reading Responses

Variables and Environments

Scripting

Collections and Organisation

Automated Testing and the Runner

Import and Export

Code Generation

Security Features

Git Integration and Collaboration

Desktop Performance

This is where Curlex is in a completely different league. Curlex is built with Tauri — a framework that uses your operating system's native webview instead of bundling an entire Chromium browser. The result is an app that is a fraction of the size and uses significantly less memory.

What Curlex Does That the Others Do Not

A few things Curlex offers that neither Postman nor Bruno have:

• PDF test run reports — export your Collection Runner results as a polished PDF for sharing with people who do not use API clients.
• OS keychain integration — passwords and secrets are stored in macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager, or Linux libsecret — not in the app's own database.
• Built-in Vault — a domain-restricted secret store where sensitive values are encrypted and never written to your collection files or Git history.
• TLS certificate chain details — see the full certificate chain for any HTTPS response, directly in the response view.
• Redirect chain visualization — see every redirect hop with its own status code and headers.
• Dart code generation — generate Dart http package code for Flutter developers.
• Favorite/pin collections — keep your most-used collections pinned to the top of the sidebar.
• ~15 MB install size — fast to download, fast to start, easy on RAM.

Summary Scorecard

Curlex's score reflects a deliberate focus: a fast, private, native desktop experience over breadth of protocol support. As the roadmap closes key gaps — proxy support, Digest and AWS authentication, collection-level scripts, general WebSocket — the overall score will continue to rise.

Switching to Curlex

From Postman

1. In Postman, open your collection and click Export → choose Collection v2.1 → save the JSON file.
2. In Curlex, click Import in the header → choose Postman → select the file.
3. Your requests, folders, headers, bodies, and auth settings come across intact.
4. Scripts you wrote using the pm.* API continue to work — Curlex supports pm as a full alias for fc.

From Bruno

Bruno stores collections as .bru files. Export your collection as Postman-format JSON from Bruno (Bruno supports this), then follow the Postman import steps above.