Intro to Workspaces

What is a workspace?

Workspaces is a collaborative environment for a group of users to develop and test APIs. Individuals can organize their work in personal workspaces and teams can collaborate in team workspaces.

Regardless of the type of workspace, you can share elements in specific teams and multiple workspaces at the same time. We define elements in Postman as Collections, Monitors, Documentation, Mocks, Environments, and Integrations.

Personal workspaces

Personal workspaces are visible only to you. If you don’t have a Postman account, you can have only one personal workspace. If you do have an account, you can create an unlimited number of workspaces.

You can remove and delete an element from a workspace. When you remove an element, it is no longer visible in that particular workspace. However, you can still access that element in any other workspace where it resides. When you delete an element, you completely eliminate it from Postman.

Team workspaces

Team workspaces are available to Postman Pro and Postman Enterprise teams. Every team has one default team workspace, and can create an unlimited number of workspaces. You can sync and share Postman environments directly in workspaces, without the need of environment templates.

You can share a collection from one workspace to another. If you have the appropriate permissions for the collection, you can edit and update the collection in any workspace where it exists.

As a Postman Pro or Enterprise user, you can create team workspaces for ongoing development or short-term collaborations. You can add and remove workspace members from among all of the organization’s paid users. Each workspace contains a shareable team request history that enables developers to debug requests and API usage collaboratively.

Postman Pro and Enterprise teams receive two free support accounts. Support account users can’t access team elements, but they can manage team administrative activities, such as billing or invoices. Also support account users can create personal workspaces.

Why use workspaces?

We designed workspaces to help better organize collections when you collaborate with others. Let’s examine a typical scenario of how workspaces makes collaboration in Postman easier.

Let’s say you are working on two projects: Neutrino level detection and Warp drive navigation. You have several personal collections that belong not only to projects Neutrino level detection and Warp drive navigation, but to other projects, too.

Perhaps your focus this week has been on Neutrino level detection. Since you have many personal collections, you need to search for the collections you need for Neutrino level detection. To prevent repeated searches for those collections, you mark them as ‘favorites’. This action makes them appear at the top of your collections list in the sidebar for quicker access.

Then, new priorities arrive from your manager, and you need to shift your time and energy to Warp drive navigation. You search for Warp drive navigation collections in the same manner as Neutrino level detection. When you mark Warp drive navigation collections as favorites, Neutrino level detection collections drop down the list. And if you work on additional projects, the process repeats and eventually all those collections become ‘lost in the crowd’ again!

Your team also shares a similar challenge. If Neutrino level detection and Warp drive navigation have dozens of collections, it’s difficult for your team to quickly identify your specific collections. Even if they subscribe to and favorite your collections, they can become lost in a long list of other collections in the sidebar.

Workspaces lets you organize your collections in two separate workspaces, Neutrino level detection and Warp drive navigation. In each workspace you can add or create collections, and invite others to collaborate. Each workspaces member can see when others add or change an element, such as an environment or monitor. Workspaces also reuse collections, so a collection can be part of Neutrino level detection and Warp drive navigation simultaneously, and any change made to the collection in any of these workspaces will reflect everywhere.

Because workspaces provides greater visibility and easier access to shared collections, the API development workflow is much smoother, and greatly reduces mistakes that occur in collaborative efforts.