API testing is one of the most critical steps of the API development cycle. You must ensure that the API you’re developing and deploying on the production server is reliable, fast, and bug-free.

But at the same time, testing APIs is a difficult task! There are many types of API testing, such as load testing, functional testing, regression testing, security testing, and so on.

To reduce the complexity of API testing, there are many free API testing and development tools available online. One of them is Firecamp.

What Is Firecamp?

As we already mentioned, API testing is a time-consuming and complex task. You can use Firecamp to reduce this complexity. Firecamp is an API testing and development platform which is free and straightforward to use. It provides many key metrics required for API testing, such as response time, response size, status codes (with their meaning), and other information.

One of the best parts of Firecamp is that you can test WebSockets and GraphQL along with traditional REST APIs. Firecamp is available as a Google Chrome extension and as a standalone application available for Linux, Windows, and MacOS.

What’s Great About Firecamp?

Well, there are many Firecamp features that developers will appreciate. Let’s go through them one by one:

Support for GraphQL, WebSockets, SocketIO (v2 and v3), and REST API

Many applications say they support GraphQL, but they just use the same REST API calls to make GraphQL calls since it uses POST. But having dedicated GraphQL testing is a blessing. Having a dedicated page for testing GraphQL brings the capability to automatically complete the mutations and the ability to fetch the complete schema.

Once you open the application, you’ll see all the supported protocols, and from there, you can select the path you want to take. This means you don’t have to manage multiple apps for testing GrapghQL APIs.

Built-in Markdown and JSON Converter

Many times you want to write documentation for your API endpoints in Markdown. But the issue is that you can’t see how it looks until you manually convert it to HTML.

Firecamp has a built-in Markdown to HTML converter, which lets you write Markdown simultaneously display a preview in the second pane. Besides that, it’ll also generate the HTML code in real-time.

Built-in YAML/JSON/XML Converter

Many API documentation tools accept YAML/JSON/XML format, but not many people know how to create YAML/XML files. Firecamp provides the ability to easily convert your JSON to YAML and XML formats.

Support for Workspace and Login

Do you want to share your APIs with other members of your team? Firecamp allows you to create a Workspace that will allow you to share your APIs with other team members. This helps maintain transparency throughout the development process and keeps the team in sync with the complete API development and testing phases.

Also, the sign-in option gives you the ability to synchronize the settings between multiple platforms. So, you don’t have to worry about maintaining the changes between numerous devices.

Import API Specs From Other Tools

Firecamp allows you to import APIs from other tools and specifications like OpenAPI, YAML, Insomnia, AsyncAPI, HAR, etc. The import process is straightforward — you just need to either use the URL or the configuration file and click on the import button.

Dedicated Human Support

You can directly contact the Firecamp team through a chat button in the application and via their Discord community. They regularly post their updates and take valuable feedback seriously. When I started using the application, I asked for multiple theme support and reported a few bugs, and the team acknowledged them instantly and pushed all the changes in the subsequent two updates.

Automatic Script Generation

Firecamp allows you to generate scripts for the API request that you have made. You can generate the code snippet in multiple languages and even different methods in a language. Firecamp supports code generation for:

• C
• Go
• JavaScript
• Java
• NodeJS
• C#
• Ruby
• Python
• Shell
• Swift

Project Management

You can create projects on Firecamp. When working on multiple projects, it’s challenging to track all the APIs and their changes. So, creating an API project makes it very easy to manage all the projects simultaneously, so you don’t get mixed up with other APIs.

Built-in Authentication System

Firecamp has a built-in authentication system, making the complete process of API authentication very easy. You don’t need to worry about the authentication part as Firecamp supports a wide range of authentication methods such as:

• Bearer
• Basic
• Digest
• OAuth 1.0
• OAuth 2.0
• AWS
• NTLM

Support for Multiple Connections

Often, you might want to test your WebSockets with multiple connections just to see how it performs. Firecamp supports this by offering the ability to connect with multiple connections in the same request tab to simulate multiple users.

Real-Time API Updates

The workspace functionality allows you to synchronize the APIs between the members of the workspace. Let’s say you added a new API for testing. This new change will be reflected for all the team members of your workspace.

What’s Bad About Firecamp?

No one is perfect in this world! Period! The same is true with API tools. There are few things that I don’t like about Firecamp, and I hope the developers will take this feedback in a positive light.

UX Needs to Be Improved

The UI is good, but the user experience needs to be improved a little bit. For example, some color choices in its dark mode are undesirable. Secondly, I’m personally not a fan of the vertical column views. In Postman, everything is divided horizontally, which helps show a complete API response, but this is not the case with Firecamp.

Limited Support for Authentication Methods

Firecamp does support the most popular authentication methods such as oAuth, Bearer token, and Basic, but its competitors like Postman are way ahead in this case. Postman supports about 11 types of authentication methods, while Firecamp supports only six.

What’s Next for Firecamp?

Firecamp keeps pushing updates nearly every week, and they also have an interactive community. When you open the homepage of the application, many features are labeled as “Coming Soon.” That opens a gate towards high expectations from the application. For example, SSE, gRPC, and RPC are tagged as coming soon. This ensures that their team is not only working on the existing features but also has set their targets to newer technologies.