The Gartner report profiles Kong’s Insomnia as “an API development platform that promotes collaboration during development and testing,” a recognition that reflects our commitment to give development teams of any size a purpose-built environment for every stage of the API lifecycle. 

Beyond the basics, the report specifically calls out several Insomnia differentiators that matter to  modern engineering teams:

MCP server testing

The report identifies only eight of the nineteen surveyed vendors that offer MCP server testing capabilities. Obviously, Insomnia is one of the eight. As Gartner notes, MCP client inquiry grew approximately 300% between the first and second halves of 2025 alone, a demand that is only accelerating. Insomnia’s ability to test MCP server implementations positions engineering teams to build and validate agentic applications with confidence, right away.  

What makes Insomnia’s MCP testing story particularly compelling is how it fits into the broader Kong ecosystem. Kong AI Gateway enables organizations to expose their APIs as MCP servers, meaning teams can rapidly unlock their API infrastructure for AI agents without rebuilding from scratch. Once those MCP servers are created, Insomnia provides the inspection layer to validate them, inspect tool invocations, and confirm that responses conform to the MCP protocol before anything reaches production. It’s an end-to-end workflow, from API to agent-ready, entirely within Kong’s platform.

Want to see this in action? Catch our on-demand webinar, How Kong Insomnia & AI-Ready APIs Are Shaping the Future of Digital Innovation, where we walked through exactly how the Kong AI Gateway and Insomnia work together, from turning your existing APIs into MCP servers to validating them from end-to-end.

For a deeper technical dive into how the inner workings of Kong’s AI/MCP Gateway are architected under the hood, reference the Kong AI/MCP Gateway and Kong MCP Server Technical Breakdown, a recommended read that pairs well with the webinar.

Flexible data storage and collaboration controls

Gartner highlights Insomnia’s flexibility in where project data lives (locally, directly to Git, or cloud-hosted), along with granular permissions and sharing controls. For enterprises managing sensitive API schemas and credentials, having sovereignty over where data lives is a non-negotiable requirement. Insomnia was designed keeping that reality in mind, regardless of the developer team size. 

With Insomnia, developers on small teams can collaborate securely for free via Git; and cloud collaboration is available with unlimited free usage. When your teams scale and do need those granular permissions and access controls, Insomnia’s enterprise gives you the tools you need today and the ones you’ll need tomorrow. Try Insomnia’s free 14-day trial today.

Security & contract testing

The report emphasizes that Insomnia supports both security and contract testing — capabilities that are, according to Gartner, rarer across the broader market. On top of that, service visualization is available, enabling teams to decouple testing from live dependencies and run realistic test plans even against unavailable or costly third-party services.

Gartner’s key recommendations for software engineering leaders read like a checklist Insomnia was built for. 

✔ Discover where coverage is low, then do something about it: Gartner recommends investing in tools that can discover integration points. Insomnia's upcoming integration with Konnect will make that effortless; developers will be able to discover available APIs and MCP servers directly from the Konnect Developer Portal, then jump straight into inspecting, testing, and debugging without ever losing context.

✔ ️ Use AI to remove the excuse of “not enough time”: Gartner explicitly calls out AI as the antidote to under-tested APIs, not a nice-to-have, but a practical way to close coverage gaps at scale. Insomnia meets that challenge head-on with AI-powered capabilities baked directly into the workflow. Smart commits automatically generate meaningful commit messages from your API changes, ensuring accurate documentation without slowing developers down. Need mock servers? Insomnia lets you spin them up using natural language. Simply describe the behavior you need in plain English, and Insomnia does the heavy lifting, no manual configuration required. The result is less friction and more coverage, at every skill level.

✔ ️ Govern emerging protocols before they govern you: Gartner flags MCP and A2A as protocols that demand additional rigor and governance. Insomnia is one of only eight vendors in the report with native MCP server testing built-in, letting teams inspect tools invocations and validate responses as a part of a standard development workflow, not as an afterthought. Pair that with Kong AI/MCP Gateway’s ability to turn existing APIs into MCP servers and you have a full end-to-end story.

✔ ️Invest in purpose-built, not bolted-on: Gartner recommends dedicated, built-for-purpose testing tools over the basic API testing functionality bolted onto larger platforms. Insomnia is exactly that, a developer-first tool designed from the ground up for API testing, not a checkbox feature inside a management console. The difference is that Insomnia also happens to sit within the Kong ecosystem, meaning when you need it, the platform is readily available there. You get the depth and focus of a dedicated testing tool with the connective tissue of an enterprise platform behind it: Kong AI Gateway, Konnect's Developer Portal, and the broader API and AI lifecycle all within reach. Built for developers. Ready for the enterprise.

Not all API testing tools are built the same way, and the choice often comes down to what your team actually needs. 

• Insomnia sits in a distinct position: a developer-first, purpose-built testing platform with native MCP support, AI-powered workflows, and the flexibility to store data locally, in Git, or in the cloud, all backed by the Kong ecosystem when your needs scale beyond testing alone.
• Bruno is an open-source, offline-first option for developers who want a lightweight, Git-native client with no cloud footprint, but it lacks support for MCP testing, security testing, or AI-powered capabilities. 
• Postman remains one of the most widely recognized names in the space, but many enterprises are actively seeking alternatives that offer stronger data privacy controls and fully on-premises options. 

Gartner estimates the API and MCP testing tools market at $582 million for 2026, with MCP-related inquiries growing by 300% year-over-year. For organizations building on agentic AI, that kind of growth demands a testing infrastructure that can keep pace. Insomnia is built for exactly that moment.

Earning a spot in this Gartner Market Guide is a milestone worth celebrating. But for us, we're taking this as a challenge to keep raising the bar. The report makes it clear that commercially supported MCP server testing capabilities will expand rapidly, and our roadmap is already ahead of the curve. We’re doubling down on the capabilities that matter most to modern engineering teams: deeper AI endpoint support, tighter integration with Konnect, and expanded security policies so teams operating in regulation-heavy environments can move fast without cutting corners. 

The shift to agentic architecture is happening right here, right now — whether teams are ready or not. The good news is Kong is building Insomnia to make sure your team gets ready quickly. 

Stay tuned — a lot is coming for Insomnia in Spring 2026.

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