Why choose Blackbird?

While Postman has been the standard API platform of developers’ past, Ambassador Blackbird is redefining the space with a developer-first, end-to-end API platform, and development environment that’s made with the future in mind.

Postman is widely known for their API testing and we’re not telling you to ditch it all together– but API development is so much more, and your development lifecycle deserves a tool that equally addresses and supports the process from spec creation to deployment. Blackbird is purpose-built for modern API development, offering seamless mocking, robust testing, and easy collaboration in a dedicated, hosted environment (on us!). Look–Postman's great for quickly interacting with your APIs, but eventually, you'll have to go outside of the Platform to accomplish the rest of your development journey…let us be where you land.

See how Blackbird stacks up against Postman for your API development workflow. Whether you’re ready to break up with Postman, or use us both for the best of both worlds.

Blackbird at a glance

Dedicated testing environment.

Unlike Postman, Blackbird manages the infrastructure for you, keeping developers focused and costs down.

API code generation and hosted mocks.

Blackbird automates API client and server code generation, whereas Postman stops with specs.

Kubernetes-friendly for seamless integrations.

Blackbird is a Kubernetes-friendly tool that can interact directly with your clusters, whereas Postman does not.

Easy for beginners. Powerful for experts.

The Blackbird platform makes the most advanced development tools accessible and streamlined for ease and speed.

Feature Comparison

Blackbird vs. Postman

Ambassador Blackbird

Postman

End-to-end API development

Modular platform for API design, mocking, codegen, debugging, and iteration with a dedicated hosted development environment

API design and local testing. Complaints of complexity for beginner users

Mocking

Instant shareable API mocks, the ability to run and debug (with IDE integration), and simple validation and fidelity testing via hosted pre-production deployments with automatically updated responses, operations, and paths

Manual response, paths, and operations for shared mocks

Testing

The ability to run and debug code (with IDE integration), and simple validation and fidelity testing via hosted pre-production deployments

Spec-centric for contract validation with API monitoring features, but you’ll have to seek an external tool to complete your testing afterward

Development environment and ephemeral deployments

Hosted containerized test environments to deploy ephemerally (for testing) without requiring DevOps

No built-in containerized test environments, but they do have a dev environment geared towards enhancing collaboration with your API dev team

Collaboration

Shareable links throughout the API development process with keys for security

API reviews, team collaboration, and versioning

Code generation

AI assisted client and server-side boilerplate code from specs

Generates code snippets

Infrastructure management

Managed development environment; no setup required

Must configure local or remote environments

AI integration

AI-assisted API design and testing

Third-party API templates

Prebuilt integrations for common APIs including Stripe, Github, Shopify, and more

Prebuilt integrations for common APIs GitHub, Slack, CircleCI, Amazon API Gateway, and New Relic

Hear from our users

From 13 days to 3 with Blackbird.

GroceryGuardian Home Grocery Management API provides an efficient solution for households to track and manage their grocery items, helping to minimize waste and optimize usage.

With Blackbird, GroceryGuardian achieved its goal of building a fast, functional solution that makes a real impact on reducing food waste, plus Blackbird was 76% faster than using FastAPI and Render.

API World Hackathon team GroceryGuardian built the same API in two different environments:

The first with Blackbird, where Go is used to create the various endpoints and test the API with its mock feature.
‍(3 days, 1 hour, and 25 minutes)

The second was built with Python, Render and FastAPI.
(13 days and 90 minutes)

While creating tests in Python, we had to create some scenarios of each endpoint. We fixed some bugs in the code but it did take longer time to debug with various test cases when compared with Blackbird setup. We wanted to leverage Ambassador’s Blackbird tool to showcase the rapid development to save developers time from start to finish.

The GroceryGuardian team

From idea to deployment in 3 minutes.

API World Hackathon Team Humorie set out to create a humor API that would deliver funny quotes to users—and they achieved this with Blackbird in record time compared to using Gravitee.

This speed difference gave Blackbird a clear edge, allowing them more time for additional development and improvements, showing that Blackbird truly is 10x faster than other API development tools.

Humorie built the same API in two different environments:

Blackbird API Development Platform
‍(3 minutes)

Gravitee API Management Solutions
(30 minutes)

We choose to use Blackbird since it allows us to build the API in the shortest amount of time possible while also producing a killer API!

The Humorie team

Price and package feature comparison

Ambassador Blackbird

Postman

Blackbird Designer Plan

$10 per month, $96 per year when billed annually. Includes unlimited APIs and endpoints, 5 concurrent instances, and 1 active user.

Basic Plan

$19 per user/month or $14 per user/month when billed annually. It includes unlimited collaboration for plan members, 1 custom domain, 10,000 calls to Postman API, and 10 integrations.

Blackbird Developer Plan

$19 per month, $182 per year when billed annually. Includes unlimited APIs and endpoints, 5 concurrent instances, and 3 active users.

Professional Plan

$39 per user/month or $29 per user/month billed annually. Features include single sign-on, 250 collection runs, private workspaces, 5 custom domains, 100,000 calls to Postman API, and 50 integrations (at $29/PUPM for 250 users, approx $87k/year).

Blackbird Enterprise Plan

Custom pricing; contact sales for more information.

Enterprise Plan

Reportedly starting at $49 per user/month; contact sales.

Try Blackbird today.

See why developers are switching from Postman to Blackbird for faster, smarter API development. Sign up for free and focus to fly your APIs today. Even better, contact us to ask us about switching over or how to use both tools together. (Trust us, it’s not you—it’s them!)

Schedule a Demo See Pricing Plans

What our customers say

Every engineer needs a way to not only build out what their API will look like, but how it’s going to work in the real world. Designing, testing, and architecting an API within your code sounds good until it needs to scale. Using Ambassador Blackbird allows you to fully design and test from the very beginning.

Michael Levan

Cloud-Native Consultant

Blackbird's actually great when you have a complex workflow in a dashboard SPA that involves multiple steps, finalized with payment, that can fail due to connectivity. Simulating errors like packet drops or session expiration is highly valuable during aggressive automated testing.

Oleh

Principal SRE and Infra Architect at Arkis

Blackbird is so easy and so straightforward; it's really great to see.

Kristina D.

Senior Software Engineer at Tietoevry

It is hands-down a must-have tool for faster, smarter API development. The tool is a lifesaver in generating clean, server-side, and client-side boilerplate code. This allows me to focus on the unique aspects of my APIs rather than spending time on repetitive coding tasks.

Shinghai Zivuku

Technical Writer

We choose to use Blackbird since it allows us to build the API in the shortest amount of time possible while also producing a killer API.

Humorie

2024 Hackathon team

We need to give this huge lift of productivity to each and everyone. With a solution like Blackbird, plus what we are already doing, will help people to adapt their skills and be more innovative … that’s the holy grail.

Driss Lamrani

CEO of A2IM-Robotadvisors

We wanted to leverage Ambassador’s Blackbird tool to showcase the rapid development to save developers time from start to finish.

‍

Grocery Guardian

2024 Hackathon team

Ambassador Blackbird makes the most sense for visualize representation of your API. Without it, you’re traversing through lines and lines of JSON or methods in your API blocks in whatever language you’re comfortable with, which instantly becomes cumbersome.

Michael Levan

Cloud-Native Consultant

Grocery Guardian

2024 Hackathon team

To install our products, we need a gateway that is cloud agnostic because we have clients who have OpenShift, AWS, Azure, etc. Because of that, we needed to partner with a solution that could support the integration of all of those. And the main hurdle we found is that depending on which gateway you use, you may experience different performances with different platforms.

Driss Lamrani

CEO of A2IM-Robotadvisors