Voiden is an offline-first, git-native API tool built on Markdown - and it very intentionally didn’t start as “let’s build a better Postman”.
Over time, API tooling became heavyweight: cloud dependencies for local work, forced accounts, proprietary formats, and workflows that break the moment you’re offline. Testing a localhost API shouldn’t need an internet connection.
So we asked a simple question: What if an API tool respected how developers already work?
That led to a few core ideas:
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Offline-first, no accounts, no telemetry
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Git as the source of truth
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Specs, tests, and docs living together in Markdown
We opensourced Voiden because extensibility without openness just shifts the bottleneck.
If workflows should be transparent, the tool should be too.
Github : https://github.com/VoidenHQ/voiden
Download here : https://voiden.md/download
curl is great. I use curl. Most developers use curl. But “you can call an API with curl” and “curl is enough as an API working environment” are two very different claims.
The problem is that real API work is almost never just one request typed into a terminal like some kind of beautifully minimalist Unix haiku. It usually turns into auth, environments, copied headers, reused payload fragments, request chains, documentation, testing, debugging, sharing examples with teammates, reviewing changes in Git, and trying not to break prod because you forgot to swap one token or one base URL.
At that point, people are not really using “just curl” anymore. They are using curl plus shell scripts, plus notes, plus env files, plus copied commands from Slack, plus random JSON files, plus tribal knowledge. Which is fine, until it becomes annoying, fragile, and weirdly hard to collaborate around.
That is the gap Voiden is trying to solve.
So for me it is not “curl vs Voiden.” curl is a low-level execution tool. Voiden is a workspace for actual API work: writing requests, organizing them, reusing pieces, documenting them, testing them, versioning them in Git, and not duplicating the same headers/body/auth setup 45 times like a person slowly losing control of their life.