Kong Insomnia 8.0 Adds Scratch Pad, Real-Time Collaboration, Enterprise SSO, AI-Generated Testing

With Kong Insomnia 8.0 and beyond, we’re returning to a semantic versioning scheme for the product, which was last used in 7.x back in early 2020. As a result, we’ll be moving away from the “year.month.day” versioning convention that was used up until now.

Long live the Scratch Pad!

Kong Insomnia 8.0 introduces the highly requested Scratch Pad capability that our community can use to try out the product without needing an Insomnia account to get started.

With Scratch Pad, you can easily debug any API locally using the native REST, SOAP, gRPC, GraphQL, WebSockets, and SSE clients, which cover the vast majority of API use cases that developers may require.

Scratch Pad data is always stored locally, even when creating a Kong Insomnia account, and it can be easily converted to a cloud project by exporting its data and re-importing it into a regular project.

With Kong Insomnia’s Scratch Pad, your collection is always stored locally.

Because Scratch Pad is only local, some capabilities may not be available, such as collaboration. For users who would like to leverage more advanced features — like the ones we're describing below — you can easily create an Insomnia account for free and then import their Scratch Pad collection into a regular project. It’s the best of both worlds.

Real-time collaboration, unlimited collaboration in the Free plan

Creating APIs is a collaborative experience. It’s all about connecting API consumers with the API providers and ensuring that they understand each other’s requirements.

With Kong Insomnia 8.0, we’ve built a new collaboration platform from the ground up that allows users to more easily share projects, collections, OpenAPI design specifications, and API tests with other collaborators — like co-workers or external consumers. This new capability is available on every Kong Insomnia plan, including the Free plan.

The invite flow has also been entirely redesigned to bring collaborators together across projects. Additionally, with the Free plan of Kong Insomnia, users will have the ability to invite an unlimited number of collaborators, as long as there’s only one project in the account.

Alternatively, you can update to any other subscription plan and invite as many collaborators on as many projects as you want.

This will allow users of the Free plan to validate that Kong Insomnia is a strong technology fit for their team’s needs before considering taking the next step with a premium plan as project scale permits it.

The new Kong Insomnia invite capability.

In addition to the new invite capabilities, we’ve introduced a real-time presence feature that will keep you updated on who’s working on a project at any given moment. This will help to increase engagement and clarity among all users who have been invited to collaborate on the project.

With the new presence capability, know who’s collaborating on your projects in real time.

All of the new collaboration features work with both the native Kong Insomnia cloud synchronization capability or with the Git synchronization capability, which allows users to connect projects with a third-party Git repository to implement GitOps workflows via the API lifecycle.

Introducing Organizations, Enterprise SSO, and RBAC

With Kong Insomnia 8.0, we’re finally introducing one of the most requested enterprise features: Enterprise SSO. Enterprise SSO provides the ability to create organizations and connect them with a third-party identity provider like Okta or PingFederate to manage login access and automatically de-provision users who are no longer working in the organization.

You can create as many organizations as needed to decide how your product teams and business units would like to optimally collaborate together. Furthermore, you have the ability to optionally connect organizations to a third-party SAML or OIDC-compatible IDP to secure access to API assets, like collections and design specifications.

Combined with the native end-to-end encryption (E2EE) capabilities of Kong Insomnia, you can now implement strong security and compliance with the most advanced enterprise security controls, all while maintaining a streamlined developer experience.

The new Enterprise SSO feature supports most IDP providers, and it’s easy to configure.

We’ve also introduced support for RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) to determine the level of access that our collaborators should have and to further improve the security posture of the organization. The new Organizations feature replaces the legacy “Teams” feature, which has been automatically migrated for you.

Kong Insomnia is fully end-to-end encrypted on every plan, including the Free plan. In a world where APIs are becoming the most important assets of your applications, with Kong Insomnia you have the peace of mind that only you and your collaborators can have access to your data.

Introducing Insomnia AI for automatically generated API tests

With Kong Insomnia 8.0, we’re introducing a new AI capability to automatically generate API tests. By simply uploading an OpenAPI specification, you can now save up to 50% more development time when creating new APIs, while simultaneously improving API reliability.

This new capability is available as an optional beta feature for our Enterprise customers and can be enabled by contacting our sales team. In the following months, we plan to make Insomnia AI available to both Team and Enterprise plans in a self-serve capacity.

As all software developers know, testing APIs can oftentimes take as much time as building them. It’s an extremely time-consuming process that many developers dread doing, therefore making this a prime use case for Kong Insomnia to tackle in order to help dramatically improve our productivity. After all, there’s no such thing as too many API tests.

With Insomnia AI, you can upload an OpenAPI specification and ask Insomnia to create tests for you, which you can then further enhance and improve. This new capability doesn’t share sensitive API information (like credentials or API keys) with any public AI model, therefore allowing you to start experimenting with AI in a safe and secure way.

The new AI capability will improve developer productivity and help create more reliable APIs.

Introducing support for SSE APIs and more

We’ve introduced the long-requested support for SSE APIs (Server Side Events) to simplify the creation of real-time experiences on mobile or the web.

With Kong Insomnia 8.0, it’s now possible to easily debug any SSE API in addition to REST, SOAP, WebSockets, gRPC, and GraphQL, allowing you to cover all of the main use cases that you may need to implement in your applications.

With SSE support — available today on every plan of Kong Insomnia and in the Scratch Pad — you can now easily send messages and visualize the response stream in a beautiful table view that allows you to filter the data you want to inspect in 1-click. Based on the same foundation of the WebSockets capability, Kong Insomnia is now a fully capable product for building any real-time experience on the web with ease and simplicity.

The new SSE debugger in Kong Insomnia 8.0

The new features of Kong Insomnia don’t stop here! We have shipped hundreds of improvements in 8.0, and in the following months, even more capabilities will be delivered — like real-time commenting and documentation, native API mocking, improved synchronization capabilities, and a brand new API testing experience.

Get a 25% off the Enterprise plan until Dec. 31, 2023

At Kong, we want to make API design and testing easier and more cost-effective.

With Kong Insomnia 8.0, we’re announcing a one-time offer to get access to the Enterprise plan with a 25% discount on any new subscription between now and the end of the year, and for any amount of seats. To get access to this offer, please contact the Kong Insomnia sales team.

Kong is known as the provider of some of the most adopted API technologies in the world, but every modern API infrastructure needs to have strong API consumption in order to be more valuable over time. With this discount offer, we want to incentivize API creation and consumption with Kong Insomnia, and if you’re already a Kong customer, you can now standardize on a consistent API stack that fully integrates with our API management and service mesh products using GitOps and the native CLI integration.

Get started with Insomnia 8.0 for free and get some REST

Start using Kong Insomnia 8.0 today for free by visiting www.insomnia.rest, and let us know your feedback!