Online Open API Embedded Clients
Categories: Tools
The default Open API Client for embedding in your application seems to be Swagger. It has a functional interface that works well as a responsive client. But it isn't a particularly user friendly interface and can be hard to navigate with a lot of endpoints.
Other tools do exist, although you might not be aware of them.
We've collated a list of tools which act as embedded OpenAPI Clients and created an overview review of each:
Redoc is an outlier in the list because the Open Source version is a 'viewer' only and doesn't allow making requests, but since it is frequently supported by API development frameworks, we've added it to the list.
What is an Embedded Open API Client?
Most API Clients are desktop tools. But it is possible to embed a client in a web page and pre-load your OpenAPI file into the client, to allow developers and people interested in your API to use it from your web site.
The tools render your OpenAPI file to show what endpoints you have, with their descriptions, and allow you to send requests to the server and see the live results.
This is particularly useful for demonstrating your API. And since you're usually hosting it on your own domain, CORS issues are less of an issue and you can let people add their authentication key and explore the API without downloading your OpenAPI file or configuring a REST API Tool.
How to Evaluate Embedded Open API Clients?
We found it a little hard to evaluate the clients.
The demo versions that we found on sites were hard to locate and because they all used different OpenAPI files in the demos it was hard to compare them all.
As a result, we've added working versions of all the clients in our Online Clients section. We've tried to make the user interface for each as consistent as possible to allow loading OpenAPI Files.
And if you want to evaluate them against consistent APIs then on each of our API Open API pages, we have buttons to load that particular APIs Open API file into the specific client.
Open API pages:
This allows you to open each of the clients with the same OpenAPI specification and see the differences.
The pages are also responsive so you can see how the clients respond to different page widths.
Experiment with OpenAPI Clients
Just because Swagger is the default in most frameworks, it doesn't mean that it is the most appropriate for your tool.
Swagger allows cURL code generation as does OpenAPI Explorer, but OpenAPI Explorer has a sidebar that makes navigation of endpoints easier.
Scalar and Stoplight both support many more code generation options so might be much better for developers, although this might clutter the view for casual users that want to evaluate the API responses.
Zudoku offers more code generation, but not quite as many as Scalar and Stoplight.
And if you just want to offer a nicer way to 'view' the documentation then Redoc might be the better choice.
We've tried to make it easier to experiment with the tools online and explore their differences hands on.