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Sparrow — The Open Source API Testing Tool For All Developers
Sparrow is a powerful API dev tool designed to simplify API testing and documentation. With features like powerful AI assistant, Automated API test flows and seamless document generation, it streamlines your dev workflow and enhances your team productivity.
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Anmol Kushwah
Maker
📌
Hey Product Hunt community! 👋
We are excited to launch Sparrow, an innovative API dev tool that aims to simplify your development process. Here’s what you can expect:
Key Features:
Powerful AI assistant
Automated API test flows
AI powered document generation
User-friendly dashboard for managing multiple APIs
Seamless collaboration tools for your team
Who it’s for:
Ideal for developers, product managers, and teams working with APIs who want to enhance productivity and streamline their workflows.
We developed Sparrow after experiencing firsthand the complexities of testing APIs across different platforms. Our goal is to create a solution that saves time and minimizes hassle.
We’re eager to hear your feedback on Sparrow, especially regarding any features you’d like to see in the future.
Don’t forget to use Sparrow for FREE!
Feel free to ask us anything about Sparrow or share your thoughts! We’re here to help.🚀
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Nice. this will be super useful for me. would love to know what was your inspiration behind building this?
@amit_arora Thanks Amit. Please give it a try and do give your feedback.
Over the last 10 years and more since we started our development journey, we have been using multiple API testing tools. Last decade Postman helped lot of devs like us to become better devs and ease our lives while speeding up testing cycles.
But with evolving needs there are some major challenges that devs are facing which we heard from others during our validation phase and faced ourselves as well. That's why we came up with something that is faster built with recent technologies and framework, open source and self hostable.
There are some great API testing tools in market but unfortunately nobody is focussing on team collaboration and focussing on improving delivery speed. That's where Sparrow comes in. Our core objective is to improve collaboration and testing quality. You will hear more about some amazing things planned in that direction soon from us as we ship more tailored features.
We are super excited to launch Sparrow and mark it open for the world. 🎉
This FREE and Open Source API testing tool is nothing of ordinary. You may think of this as yet another API Testing tool but we realised most of the tools focus on just giving a "duplicate" experience and not focus on creating something that maybe useful and beneficial for 2024 and 2025.
Don't get us wrong! We loved Postman, but this decade requires next evolution and that's what Sparrow is. It is for students, new devs, small companies, big companies and enterprises. It is for everyone!
⭐️ Here is what to expect ⭐️
✅ Self Hosting support - When we use Postman, we are always worried about our devs saving the APIs on Postman's server and that was one of the most uncomfortable thing for us. Till now many companies are not able to constraint developers to keep important secrets safe in Postman and this significantly reduces the risk of such exposure.
✅ Security by default - Some decisions in Postman related to sharing postman collections as JSON, accidental publishing of collection were taken to encourage more people use the tool but it came with a setback. We have seen so many postman collections published online which were not supposed to be published with sensitive information. In Sparrow, you just have one way to share, that's adding user as collaborator. So no security lapses!
✅ AI Support - Hey you can't talk about a tool in 2024 without talking about AI. When you open an API in Sparrow, the Sparrow AI agent sets that as context and will give you answer with respect to the API itself. Ask the Sparrow AI to generate a axios request or your API resut in Rust, or you want sample post bodies to be generated? just ask it along. It doesn't end here, we have AI generated documentation as well. Which allows you to generate documentation for your frontend developers.
✅ FREE collaboration - When you invite your colleagues or friends in Sparrow, we don't enforce ANY limit in terms of how many APIs you can create there for free unlike some other tools. Collaboration is at core of Sparrow and that's what makes it not another API Testing tool.
✅ Different API supports - We support REST and Websockets currently. GraphQL, SocketIO are WIP and you would be able to use them soon. We release every 2 weeks and it improves by a LOT in every release.
✅ Different environment support - This may feel not new but try it once and you would know what we are talking about. Switching environment and making sense of what it can accomplish has never been before this easy.
✅ Test Flows - Oh yes we wanna talk about a key feature we built from ground up, it allows you to test multiple APIs together in a sequence. We did ground level research with 100s of developers on what they would want and came up with current experience.
Lastly, this is just a start. We don't want a tool that does everything but ensure whatever it does, it does it in the best way possible. We are working tirelessly to make it tool of choice for every single developer on planet.
And did I mention it is NOT electron application? Yes! you heard it right! It is built on Tauri - using svelte JS and Rust, two of the blazing fast framework + langugage combo. It uses your own OS's browser agent so it is super light weight and super smooth.
Feel free to contribute and star our repo on GitHub at https://github.com/sparrowapp-dev
We are open for feedback, use our canny.io link to submit your feedback and rest assured that shall be handled.
Please upvote us and let's cheers to your new API sidekick you needed.
hey this looks great, and open source! Congrats on the launch 🚀 how does it compare to something like Insomnia? Aside from being free!
@jonnymiles Thanks Jonny. The primary difference between both is the placement and objective of Sparrow is collaboration not just testing and free self-hosting support. Following are some more details:
*Collaboration*
- Ability to create multiple teams and workspaces with fine tuned access control
- Sparrow Active Sync - This is WIP and it allows Sparrow to directly connect with GIt to have different versions of same collection available if your repositories exposes OAS and it syncs the APIs automatically when new are added in your projects.
*Self Hosting*
- You can host your own version of Sparrow and run it in private environment
- When you use Sparrow for Web which we are launching next month, you can ensure all the APIs go through your defined custom proxy server only so that any APIs which are behind a VPN or sensitive in nature cannot be accessed outside.
Apart from this API collection testing we built from ground up, both Postman and Insomnia uses collection runners kind of experience to run multiple APIs but we didn't want to duplicate anything but knowing pain point wanted to improve on this. Do try it out and you would see the difference in productivity and ease of use right away. 😃
Developer first product, awesome to use. Highly recommend Sparrow to any developer looking for a reliable API testing solution!
@school_4_ants Hey Hunter, currently not. But we see lot of people are interested in it. We want to make sure whatever we do it doesn't have steep learning curve associated with it. So that's where we will RnD a little bit to ensure our approach is not overwhelming for new people while also providing power to professionals. Thanks for the upvote. :)
@gauravc12 Who are you making this for if not professional developers? I'd recommend looking at Postman's Newman and Bruno as reference for CLI usage.
@school_4_ants being professional devs ourselves, we don't want to overwhelm them with one more script and syntax that they have to learn.
There can be better way to handle it that I am sure we will figure it out. 🙂
Well done Anmol! You’re doing an excellent job with Sparrow here, simplifying development process. I’m sure many devs will take the most of it. Really congrats!
I love how you have a good UI along with all these features and the best Open Source!!
Finally, Sparrow is here!! Loved the competitive advantages and features it offers. Which makes it uniquely useful from all other API testing tools. And yeah, the beautiful and intuitive UI is just awesome!
Many many congratulations on the launch. Greatly appreciate the hard work of the team behind this amazing tool. 🚀
Keep up the good work!! 🔥
Sparrow looks like a must-have tool for anyone working with APIs! The combination of automated API test flows, seamless documentation generation, and an AI assistant is a huge productivity boost. Simplifying API testing and documentation while enhancing team workflows is exactly what dev teams need to stay efficient. Can’t wait to try it out and see how it transforms the API dev process!
FInally Sparrow is here, an excellent product for Developers which is very easy to use. With it's incredible features like API Testing, Team Collaboration, Documentation Generation and Testflows it's a game changer in the Development field.
So do try this product and don't forget to share your feedbacks.
Maker
@astitvapatle rightly mentioned, Please provide feedbacks everyone. Lets grow together.
FREE, Open Source, and Secure. What more do you need from an app? Ohh wait!! A mix of beautiful UI and thats how you create Sparrow. A lot of great things coming up so stay tuned.
Maker
The wait is over here, sparrow is officially launched. that is build by developers for developers to ease in the API testing journey.
Want to join our open-source journey - lets start with your first pull request in our official github repositories. Our tech team is always ready to help.
💡 Bright idea
Congrats on launching @gauravc12 @joshi_rahul @astitvapatle @itsmdasifraza and the entire Sparrow team! 🎉
API management is such a crucial part of modern development, and it's great to see Sparrow making it easier for agile teams and individual developers to streamline their workflows. Testing, organizing, and sharing APIs can be a pain point for many, so having an all-in-one solution like Sparrow is definitely a valuable addition to the ecosystem.
A couple of questions I had about your roadmap and the direction of the product:
Collaboration and team features: As Sparrow is geared towards agile teams, do you have plans to introduce more collaborative tools such as version control or team-wide API analytics? How do you envision scaling these features for larger teams or organizations that handle numerous APIs simultaneously?
Security and governance: With APIs being critical touchpoints for many businesses, security is always top of mind. Are there plans to add features around API security and governance, such as automated vulnerability detection or compliance checks? This could be a big draw for companies with stringent API security needs.
Now for some feedback:
The platform looks well-organized and user-friendly, which is perfect for developers who want to quickly test and manage their APIs. However, I think expanding the integration options to work with popular dev tools like GitHub, Postman, or CI/CD pipelines could take the workflow to the next level, making Sparrow more deeply integrated into existing development processes.
Suggestion: Consider adding pre-built integrations with widely used developer tools to help teams transition smoothly to Sparrow and further improve their API management workflows.
Also, I noticed there’s no live chat support on the site. Adding a customer support chatbot could help users troubleshoot faster or get answers to their technical questions more easily, improving their overall experience with the platform.
All in all, Sparrow looks like a game changer for API management, and I’m excited to see how it continues to grow! 🙌
@joshi_rahul @astitvapatle @itsmdasifraza @uvkewate Thanks Yuvraj for putting time on putting such a detailed feedback as well as for your questions. Let me answer them here:
Collaboration and team features -
We were supposed to launch 2-3 months back and one of the primary reason why our release was delayed was Sparrow Active Sync functionality. One primary reason where all API testing tools fail is keeping collections in sync with the code base without manual intervention. This is where Active Sync comes in picture. It is baked into Sparrow but not enabled yet as we are still testing it to ensure this is something that solves problem for everyone. The way it works is it will ask you where your code base is hosted locally and automatically identify a local OAS URL. After that everything is automated. It will automatically add new APIs as they are built or as you pull them from your repo also keeping track of different git branches.
Security and governance -
We believe a dev tool should make devs a better dev. So yes! it is extremely important that we give feedback to users on their APIs and share best practices. Very basic version of this is already in place inside Sparrow when you try out different APIs you get suggestion in terms of not right way to use POST body, authentication, parameters, etc. But it is not just limited to that, in our future roadmap we are planning to utilize Sparrow AI which is already part of the application to give automatic suggestions. You can try that today when an API is open, if you ask Sparrow AI on best practices it will assist you with changes.
The above paragraph doesn't talk about governance for which we are introducing self hostable version of Sparrow. Where enterprise can host their own Sparrow server and ensure that nothing goes outside their vicinity. Next sprint we are also launching Sparrow for Web where you don't need to install the application to use it. If you are having your own sparrow server, all the APIs will be routed via that server as proxy only and can log all the requests that are getting made internally. This also solves one more problem of not having to expose APIs outside of a closed network for someone to use which causes security vulnerabilities. The feedback related to compliance check and vulnerability is well taken, thanks for it. We will definitely focus on it and try to have admin dashboard in place for enterprise.
On other feedbacks -
All of the feedbacks are really insightful and will help in shaping the tool in future. Git and Postman integrations are already WIP, others we will definitely put in our backlog.
We are setting up our support channels currently so stay tuned to see it on the website.
Thanks again for such great suggestions. 😊
Such an amazing piece of work. This is really helpful in fulfilling mundane tasks as developer.