Insomnia significantly outpaces HTTPie in community adoption with 39,908 stars compared to 4,016 stars on GitHub. This 9.9x difference suggests Insomnia has a much larger and more active community. In terms of developer contributions, Insomnia has 2,357 forks, indicating strong developer engagement.

Insomnia shows more recent development activity with its last commit 12 hours ago, while HTTPie was last updated 1 year ago. This suggests Insomnia is being more actively maintained.

Both tools share common technology foundations, being built with Bash. However, they differ in their additional technology choices: HTTPie uses Python, Ruby while Insomnia leverages JavaScript, CSS, Typescript, JSX, C, Objective-C, C++.

Insomnia has been in development longer, starting 10 years ago, compared to HTTPie which began 5 years ago. This 5.7-year head start suggests Insomnia may have more mature features and established processes.

HTTPie uses the BSD-3-Clause license, which is more permissive than Insomnia's Apache-2.0 license, potentially offering greater flexibility for commercial use and integration.

Both tools serve similar use cases in API Clients.