I
Insomnia
Insomnia was great.
Until Kong changed everything.
When Kong acquired Insomnia and forced cloud sync, tens of thousands of users lost trust overnight. Local storage was eventually restored under pressure, but the message was clear: your data is not safe when a company can change the rules.
What happened
The Insomnia acquisition timeline
2016
Insomnia launches as a local-first REST client
2019
Gains GraphQL support, grows in popularity
2023
Kong Inc. acquires Insomnia
2023 Q3
Version 8.0 shipped — drops local storage, forces cloud sync
2023 Q4
Mass user exodus after forced account requirement
2024
Local storage restored in response to backlash, but trust eroded
Scrapeman's promise: No corporate acquisition can change where your data lives. It's on your disk. Period. The source code is open. If we ever did the wrong thing, you could fork it.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Scrapeman | Insomnia |
|---|---|---|
| Local-first (no cloud required) | Yes | Partially restored |
| No account required | Yes | No |
| Auto-decompress gzip/brotli | Yes | No |
| Persistent cookie jar | Yes | Yes |
| SSE event streaming | Yes | No |
| 2MB+ response + save to disk | Yes | No |
| AWS SigV4 auth | Yes | Yes |
| GraphQL support | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | Yes | Partially (core only) |
| Community-owned roadmap | Yes | No |
| Free forever | Yes | No |
Where Insomnia wins
We are not better at everything
- Insomnia ships GraphQL and gRPC out of the box. Scrapeman is HTTP/HTTPS only today (GraphQL is on the M12 roadmap).
- Plugin ecosystem with community-built plugins for custom auth, response transforms, and integrations. Scrapeman has no plugin layer yet.
- Built-in code generation in many languages via insomnia-codegen. Scrapeman ships hand-written generators for curl, JS fetch, Python, and Go only.
- Insomnia has years of polish behind it, originally designed by Greg Schier (who now builds Yaak). Scrapeman is younger and smaller.
If GraphQL or gRPC is your hard requirement today, look at Insomnia (or Yaak). If you want a local-first client that no acquisition can take away, try Scrapeman.
Local-first. For real, this time.
No acquisition can take your data. It's on your machine, always.
Download Scrapeman