Guides

HITOP vs Yaak

How HITOP and Yaak compare on licensing, price, Git sync, the CLI, CI reports and Postman import. Facts checked on 2026-11-01, with sources.

In short

Yaak is a fast desktop API client by the author of Insomnia, with REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket and Server-Sent Events, plugins, and directory sync to YAML files for Git. Its source is MIT; its prebuilt app is free for personal use and needs a license at work. HITOP is a smaller tool: an HTTP client and collection runner around a YAML folder format, with a CLI made for CI and a web app.

Checked on 2026-11-01 against the pages listed under Sources.

Side by side

HITOP Yaak
Price Free: CLI, web app, desktop builds on GitHub, also at work. Mac App Store app $4.99 and iOS $2.99, paid once Free for personal use; at work Individual $79 per year or $399 once, Business $149 per user per year
License MIT, binaries included Source MIT; licensing applies to the prebuilt binaries
Account None None for the trial; a purchased license is tied to a Yaak account
Files for Git The collection folder is the source: hitop.yaml, one YAML file per request, environments/ Directory sync mirrors a workspace to YAML files, one per resource (yaak.<id>.yaml), with Git actions in the app; environments are left out unless marked sharable
CLI hitop: runs collections for CI with reports and exit codes @yaakapp/cli on npm (written in Rust): manages workspaces, folders, environments and requests, sends workspaces and folders (--parallel, --fail-fast)
CI reports JUnit XML, a versioned JSON report and a self-contained HTML page; GitHub Action, GitLab template, hitop schedule for scheduled runs Not described in the CLI docs
Postman import Collections, environments and globals; pm.* scripts through a compatibility layer, unsupported calls listed by line. Also OpenAPI 3.0 and 3.1 import and sync A Postman migration guide; imports Postman, Insomnia, OpenAPI, Swagger and curl
Secrets OS keychain or environment variables; references to Vault or OpenBao, AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault and 1Password OS keychain, secrets encryption
Protocols HTTP everywhere. GraphQL (with schema completion) in the CLI and web app; WebSocket in the CLI and web app (a browser can't send handshake headers); gRPC, unary and server streaming, in the CLI. The desktop app gets all of them with its new UI (the web app in Tauri, in testing) REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket, Server-Sent Events
AI tools hitop mcp: an MCP server over stdio for a collection folder An MCP server and an agent skill for the CLI (docs)
Plugins None Plugins for auth, template tags and the UI

The difference in practice

Yaak's files are a mirror of its app database, written by the app. HITOP's folder is the collection itself: you can write a request file by hand, review it in a pull request and run it with hitop run in CI, and the format has a published spec. Yaak has Server-Sent Events, and WebSocket and gRPC in its desktop app, plus a plugin system, today.

Sources

Open the web app All guides