It’s not nearly as lightweight, and one of the major dealbreakers for postman and equivalents (even ignoring all the drama with postman) is that you have to import and export the data in the client in order to get some text file you can just commit to repo. For my team, that’s a dealbreaker, because it means that people write entire suites of stuff, and never commit them, meaning other people end up doing the same work over and over.
In Bruno you don't have to import or export to get a text file.
Ahhh, ok. I think I’m thinking about Insomnia, which is basically (in fact?) a fork of Postman. Anyways, that fact is what made Postman a dealbreaker for me, even before the drama. Another thing I like about Rest Client is that the configuration is just a text file, so bearer token etc can be updated via script that runs in a loop.
Rest Client has a few cons though, like request chaining.
In Bruno the config also is just a text file.
I was using Rest Client and was very happy with it, but once I needed Rest Client to use my computer's NO_PROXY env variable to avoid using the proxy for a certain url, and I found it was not possible to do that with Rest Client. That's the only reason I had to look for an alternative tool. After an analysis, I liked Bruno and Hurl. I didn't try hurl yet.
It is targeted toward more postman crowd though. May not be as lightweight.