Postman Collections do the same thing, and are more flexible. They support authentication tokens, and you can even write your own JS scripts if you need more advanced validations. You can use those in the desktop app [1], or there's a CLI, Newman[2].

(I used to work at Postman)

[1]: https://www.getpostman.com [2]: https://github.com/postmanlabs/newman

SoapUI[0] is Open Source and should also be mentioned.

[0]: https://www.soapui.org/downloads/latest-release.html

Seems nice for basic REST calls, but it's a bit of a saturated market IMO. I personally prefer Postman for exploratory and sharing with colleagues, shakedown ( https://github.com/robwhitby/shakedown ) for pure bash scripts if restricted to that, and karateDSL ( https://github.com/intuit/karate ) for a complete solution including cucumber, js, test report generation etc..

I've seen a similar approach with UnRAVL: https://github.com/sassoftware/unravl

UnRAVL is neat because writing test scripts in JSON makes it easy to include a formatted request body. The drawback is that variable substitutions only support strings due to the limitations imposed by JSON.

Looks interesting. Any plans to add authentication and token functionality?

The Russian doll model might allow someone to plug that in pretty easily.

Similar concept but with Gherkin syntax: https://github.com/hidroh/cucumber-api

Also check out Artillery: https://github.com/shoreditch-ops/artillery

And Tavern: https://github.com/taverntesting/tavern