Postman Public API Network: The central hub for API discovery and collaboration 🌐🤝💡

The Postman Public API Network is the world's largest ecosystem for public APIs, collections, and workspaces. 🚀 It's a centralized platform provided by Postman to simplify and accelerate API discovery, consumption, and collaboration. Whether you're a developer looking for a specific API or an API provider looking to expose your APIs to a global community, the Public API Network provides the tools and reach to achieve these goals. It promotes API-first development by creating transparency and enabling seamless integration of APIs into applications.

Our purpose and vision

The primary purpose of the Postman Public API Network is to democratize and accelerate API development and integration. We want to create a world where APIs are easy to discover, understand, and use to drive innovation and make software development more efficient.

Our vision is to be the ultimate collaborative environment for the API community, where developers and companies worldwide work together to build better APIs and maximize their use. We strive to minimize the "time to first call" for every API and strengthen the global API economy.

Core functions and capabilities

The Postman Public API Network offers a number of powerful features for API consumers and publishers:

• Comprehensive API search and discovery: 🔎

  • Search tens of thousands of public APIs, collections, workspaces, flows, and teams from companies worldwide.

  • Discover curated lists ("Spotlight"), trending APIs ("Trending"), and new publishers.

  • Find APIs for specific use cases, such as app security, financial services, DevOps, or AI.

• Postman Collections: 📦

  • APIs are organized as "collections" (collections of API requests, tests, and documentation).

  • Forking: Copy public collections into your own Postman workspace to customize, test, or use them as a starting point for your own developments without affecting the original.

  • "Run in Postman" button: Easy integration of collections into your own projects with one click.

• Public Workspaces: 👥

  • API publishers can share their workspaces and their contents (APIs, collections, documentation, flows) publicly.

  • Enables collaborative development and feedback with a global community.

  • Provides a central location for all relevant API resources of a publisher.

• API documentation: 📝

  • Publishers can publish detailed and interactive API documentation directly on the network to make it easier for consumers to learn.

• Publisher tools: 📢

  • Publisher profiles for showcasing APIs and social media.

  • Metrics and comments to collect user feedback.

  • Increased visibility in Postman and organic search results.

• Postman Flows: 〰️

  • Visual low-code editor for creating API workflows, integrations, and automations directly in the workspace.

• Integration with Postman API Platform: 🛠️

  • Seamless integration with the Postman platform's comprehensive tools for API design, development, testing, monitoring, and governance.

Advantages and target group

The Postman Public API Network offers significant benefits for everyone involved in the API lifecycle:

For API consumers (developers, testers):

• Faster integration: Instant access to thousands of APIs with ready-made collections and documentation accelerates your time to first call. ⚡

• Simplified onboarding: Clear documentation and ready-to-use examples make it easier to understand and use new APIs. 📚

• Collaboration and learning: Engage with publishers and the community to learn best practices and contribute to API improvements. 🤝

• Continuous updates: Direct access to the latest API workflows and changes from publishers. 🔄

For API publishers (companies, teams):

• Increased visibility and adoption: Your APIs are made accessible to millions of developers worldwide. 📈

• Reduced onboarding time: Providing preconfigured collections and detailed documentation improves the user experience and reduces support effort. ⏱️

• Direct feedback: Opportunity to interact with the user community to gather feedback and continuously improve APIs. 💬

• Standardization: Promotes consistent API design and documentation practices. ✅

• Marketing and branding platform: showcase your API offerings and team expertise. 📢

Target group:

• API consumers: software developers, integration engineers, data scientists, testers, technical writers.

• API publishers: Companies (startups, SMEs, large corporations), software vendors, open source projects that want to make their APIs available to a wide audience.

Technology and functionality

The Postman Public API Network is deeply integrated with the Postman API Platform , a cloud-based solution for the entire API lifecycle. The core components are:

• Postman Collections: JSON-based specifications that define a collection of API requests, sample responses, tests, and variables. They serve as the primary form of exchanging API definitions.

• Workspaces: Collaborative environments in Postman where teams can develop, test, and document APIs. These workspaces can be made public in the Public API Network.

• Cloud infrastructure: Postman hosts the network in its robust cloud infrastructure, ensuring scalability, availability, and performance.

• APIs as Products: The network promotes the idea of APIs as products that go through a life cycle from design and development to release, monitoring and versioning.