Why choose Blackbird?

Tired of manually configuring environments, struggling with collaboration, and fighting limited mocking tools? It’s time to cure your Insomnia.

While Kong Insomnia is a well-known API client for testing REST, SOAP and GraphQL endpoints, Ambassador’s Blackbird is purpose-built to streamline the entire API development lifecycle. Insomnia might be the darling of request debugging, however, it doesn’t cover the full API development lifecycle like Blackbird does, from design to delivery.

If you're looking for a powerful, cloud-hosted, and AI-infused API development tool with seamless mocking, testing, and collaboration, Blackbird may be for you.

Blackbird at a glance

Chat to spec: APIs in seconds.

Blackbird’s built-in chat feature gets you started instantly. Simply describe your API, and Blackbird generates a fully structured spec with all endpoints in seconds. You can also import your own or use a third-party template for faster development.

Quick, hosted mocking: no setup required.

Forget manual setups and local-only mocks. Blackbird provides a fully hosted mocking environment with dynamic and static response generation, making API testing easy across teams and CI/CD pipelines. Plus, with advanced mocking capabilities and Chaos Mode, testing just got a whole lot smoother.

Built for collaboration.

Blackbird offers a central API catalog, a dedicated development environment, and secure, shareable links to APIs in progress—allowing teams to collaborate seamlessly on API design, testing, and iteration. While Insomnia’s Git sync is useful, it lacks real-time collaboration tailored for API development.

AI-powered code generation.

Stay ahead with AI-assisted code generation that speeds up development, keeping teams efficient in today’s fast-paced environment. Insomnia requires manual scaffolding, making it harder to scale at the pace of AI-driven innovation and API growth.

The complete API lifecycle: from design to deployment.

Blackbird supports the entire API lifecycle—from design to delivery—in a production-like development environment. This eliminates context-switching between tools and keeps teams organized and focused until the API reaches the finish line.

Local-to-remote development with Telepresence.

Blackbird now includes Telepresence Enterprise, allowing seamless remote cluster connections and real-time traffic routing for tests. Developers can run and debug APIs with live traffic from their own Kubernetes clusters (Private Cloud), unlocking powerful local-to-remote development workflows.

Feature Comparison

Blackbird vs. Insomnia

Ambassador Blackbird

Kong Insomnia

API mocking

Fast, hosted dynamic and static mocking with shareable links and Chaos Mode

No dynamic response generation or Chaos Mode

Collaboration

A cloud-based, team-friendly API development environment with a central catalog, self-hosted mock servers, and shareable, privacy-protected links for reviews, mocking, testing, and debugging

Cloud sync function to share their concept of documents

API specs can sync via Git. Cloud sync for document sharing. Basic mock servers (self-hosted only at enterprise level)

API testing

Built-in hosted testing for local debugging and deployment, with optional remote K8s connection. Supports contract, chaos, validation, fidelity, integration, and deployment testing

Manual request testing with scripting support. Limited to basic assertions and unit tests. No advanced testing features

Environment management

Dedicated production-like testing environment with ephemeral pre-production deployments. Supports local-to-remote development via Telepresence

Requires manual configuration. No automated test environments

Support for API standards

Supports REST APIs. Code generation in 30+ frameworks

Supports GraphQL, REST, WebSockets, SSE, gRPC

Integration with DevOPS

No infrastructure burden—fully managed development & testing environments. CI/CD integrations coming soon.

Requires additional CI/CD configuration. Supports custom plugins and scripting via JavaScript

Code generation

AI-assisted client & server-side code generation in 50+ languages

Manual request testing with scripting support

Blackbird API Development Platform

See why developers are switching to Blackbird for faster, smarter API development.

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What our customers say

Every engineer needs a way to not only build out what their API will look like, but how it’s going to work in the real world. Designing, testing, and architecting an API within your code sounds good until it needs to scale. Using Ambassador Blackbird allows you to fully design and test from the very beginning.

Michael Levan

Cloud-Native Consultant

Blackbird's actually great when you have a complex workflow in a dashboard SPA that involves multiple steps, finalized with payment, that can fail due to connectivity. Simulating errors like packet drops or session expiration is highly valuable during aggressive automated testing.

Oleh

Principal SRE and Infra Architect at Arkis

Blackbird is so easy and so straightforward; it's really great to see.

Kristina D.

Senior Software Engineer at Tietoevry

It is hands-down a must-have tool for faster, smarter API development. The tool is a lifesaver in generating clean, server-side, and client-side boilerplate code. This allows me to focus on the unique aspects of my APIs rather than spending time on repetitive coding tasks.

Shinghai Zivuku

Technical Writer

We choose to use Blackbird since it allows us to build the API in the shortest amount of time possible while also producing a killer API.

Humorie

2024 Hackathon team

We need to give this huge lift of productivity to each and everyone. With a solution like Blackbird, plus what we are already doing, will help people to adapt their skills and be more innovative … that’s the holy grail.

Driss Lamrani

CEO of A2IM-Robotadvisors

We wanted to leverage Ambassador’s Blackbird tool to showcase the rapid development to save developers time from start to finish.

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Grocery Guardian

2024 Hackathon team

Ambassador Blackbird makes the most sense for visualize representation of your API. Without it, you’re traversing through lines and lines of JSON or methods in your API blocks in whatever language you’re comfortable with, which instantly becomes cumbersome.

Michael Levan

Cloud-Native Consultant

While creating tests in Python, we had to create some scenarios of each endpoint. We fixed some bugs in the code but it did take longer time to debug with various test cases when compared with Blackbird setup.

Grocery Guardian

2024 Hackathon team

To install our products, we need a gateway that is cloud agnostic because we have clients who have OpenShift, AWS, Azure, etc. Because of that, we needed to partner with a solution that could support the integration of all of those. And the main hurdle we found is that depending on which gateway you use, you may experience different performances with different platforms.

Driss Lamrani

CEO of A2IM-Robotadvisors