What is Charles?
Charles is a web proxy (HTTP Proxy / HTTP Monitor) that runs on your own computer. Your web browser (or any other Internet application) is then configured to access the Internet through Charles, and Charles is then able to record and display for you all of the data that is sent and received.
Charles is a tool in the API Tools category of a tech stack.
Who uses Charles?
Companies
31 companies reportedly use Charles in their tech stacks, including Testing, Oh Polly, and car2go.
Developers
103 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Charles.
Charles's Features
- SSL Proxying – view SSL requests and responses in plain text
- Bandwidth Throttling to simulate slower Internet connections including latency
- AJAX debugging – view XML and JSON requests and responses as a tree or as text
- AMF – view the contents of Flash Remoting / Flex Remoting messages as a tree
- Repeat requests to test back-end changes
- Edit requests to test different inputs
- Breakpoints to intercept and edit requests or responses
- Validate recorded HTML, CSS and RSS/atom responses using the W3C validator
Charles Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Charles?
Fiddler
It is a free web debugging proxy for any browser, system or platform. It helps you debug web applications by capturing network traffic between the Internet and test computers. The tool enables you to inspect incoming and outgoing data to monitor and modify requests and responses before the browser receives them.
Postman
It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide.
Insomnia REST Client
Insomnia is a powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication for Mac, Window, and Linux.
OpenAPI
It is a publicly available application programming interface that provides developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application or web service.
Retrofit
Retrofit turns your HTTP API into a Java interface
