Bruno is great.
These 4 bugs aren't.
Bruno nailed the local-first, git-friendly workflow. But for scraping — where SSE streams, big payloads, persistent cookies, and concurrent auth matter daily — it has real open bugs. Scrapeman fixes all of them.
4 Open Issues
Bugs that block scraping workflows
SSE connections hang forever
Server-Sent Events never terminate in Bruno — the response body stream is never closed, so you wait forever. Scrapeman buffers each event as it arrives and displays a live event log.
Fixed
Full SSE support — events stream in real time with id, event type, and data. Connection closes cleanly.
UI freezes on large response bodies
Load a 5MB JSON response in Bruno and the app freezes or crashes. The entire body is held in memory and rendered at once. Scrapeman caps display at 2MB and lets you save the full body to disk.
Fixed
2MB display cap + save-to-disk for any size. No freeze, no crash.
Cookies lost on restart
Bruno's cookie jar lives in memory only. Restart the app and all your session cookies are gone — including Cloudflare clearance tokens that took multiple requests to obtain.
Fixed
Cookie jar is written to disk on every change. Restart Scrapeman and your session resumes exactly.
OAuth2 concurrent token fetch race condition
Fire multiple requests simultaneously in Bruno with OAuth2 auth and each request races to fetch a new token — flooding your token endpoint. Scrapeman de-duplicates in-flight token fetches.
Fixed
One in-flight token request shared across all concurrent requests. Token endpoint never hammered.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Scrapeman | Bruno |
|---|---|---|
| Local-first (no cloud) | Yes | Yes |
| No account required | Yes | Yes |
| Git-friendly collection format | Yes | Yes |
| Single-request load runner | Yes | No |
| Native Scrape.do proxy | Yes | No |
| Auto-decompress gzip/brotli | Yes | No |
| Persistent cookie jar | Yes | No |
| SSE event streaming | Yes | No |
| 2MB+ body + save to disk | Yes | No |
| OAuth2 token dedup | Yes | No |
| Auto-set Content-Type header | Yes | No |
| AWS SigV4 auth | Yes | Yes |
| Pre-request scripts (JS) | No | Yes |
| GraphQL editor | No | Yes |
| Free forever | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | Yes |
Bruno excels at git-native collections and scripting. Scrapeman focuses on scraping-specific reliability.
Where Bruno wins
We are not better at everything
- Bruno started the local-first, git-friendly API client niche. The .bru file format has years of community adoption and tutorials.
- Pre-request and post-request scripts in JavaScript, plus the Bruno CLI for CI runners. Scrapeman has no scripting sandbox today.
- Built-in GraphQL editor with introspection. Scrapeman is HTTP/HTTPS only for now — GraphQL is on the roadmap (M12).
- Pure community open source, MIT, no company-backed angle to worry about. Some teams prefer that funding model.
If JS scripting or GraphQL is your hard requirement today, stay with Bruno. If you also need SSE that does not hang, large responses without crashes, persistent cookies, and a load runner, try Scrapeman.