If you want the simplest option with no dedicated QA engineer, I’d start with:

1) Postman

Best for: manual + automated API testing in one place

Why it’s the easiest:

• Very beginner-friendly UI
• You can send requests immediately
• Save collections of endpoints
• Add simple tests with JavaScript
• Run them locally or in CI with Newman
• Great for exploring APIs during development

Good if you want:

• Fast setup
• No heavy coding at first
• A tool devs can use without much process overhead

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2) If you want tests in code: Playwright + API requests

Best for: teams already using JavaScript/TypeScript

Why:

• Single tool for API + UI testing
• Easy CI integration
• Clean developer workflow
• Good long-term maintainability if your team codes in TS/JS

But it’s a bit less “instant” than Postman.

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3) If you want very lightweight automation: pytest + requests

Best for: Python-friendly teams

Why:

• Simple and readable
• Easy to scale into proper test suites
• Good for CI
• Great if your backend team already uses Python

But you’ll need more coding discipline than with Postman.

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My practical recommendation

If you have no dedicated QA engineer and want the lowest-friction start:

Start with Postman. Then:

• keep collections organized by service
• add a few smoke tests
• run them in CI with Newman

If you later want better maintainability, migrate the critical tests into code.

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Quick decision guide

• Non-QA people need to write tests: Postman
• Your team is JS/TS-heavy: Playwright
• Your team is Python-heavy: pytest + requests

If you want, I can also suggest the best setup for your stack and give you a minimal starter template.