Alternatives to cURL logo

Alternatives to cURL

Postman, HTTPie, Google Drive, CloudFlare, and Dropbox are the most popular alternatives and competitors to cURL.
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What is cURL and what are its top alternatives?

Used in command lines or scripts to transfer data. It is also used in cars, television sets, routers, printers, audio equipment, mobile phones, tablets, and is the internet transfer backbone for thousands of software applications affecting billions of humans daily.
cURL is a tool in the File Transfer category of a tech stack.
cURL is an open source tool with 35.6K GitHub stars and 6.4K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to cURL's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to cURL

  • Postman
    Postman

    It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide. ...

  • HTTPie
    HTTPie

    It is a Modern command line HTTP client – user-friendly curl alternative with intuitive UI, JSON support, syntax highlighting, wget-like downloads, extensions, etc ...

  • Google Drive
    Google Drive

    Keep photos, stories, designs, drawings, recordings, videos, and more. Your first 15 GB of storage are free with a Google Account. Your files in Drive can be reached from any smartphone, tablet, or computer. ...

  • CloudFlare
    CloudFlare

    Cloudflare speeds up and protects millions of websites, APIs, SaaS services, and other properties connected to the Internet. ...

  • Dropbox
    Dropbox

    Harness the power of Dropbox. Connect to an account, upload, download, search, and more. ...

  • Amazon CloudFront
    Amazon CloudFront

    Amazon CloudFront can be used to deliver your entire website, including dynamic, static, streaming, and interactive content using a global network of edge locations. Requests for your content are automatically routed to the nearest edge location, so content is delivered with the best possible performance. ...

  • Akamai
    Akamai

    If you've ever shopped online, downloaded music, watched a web video or connected to work remotely, you've probably used Akamai's cloud platform. Akamai helps businesses connect the hyperconnected, empowering them to transform and reinvent their business online. We remove the complexities of technology, so you can focus on driving your business faster forward. ...

  • MaxCDN
    MaxCDN

    The MaxCDN Content Delivery Network efficiently delivers your site’s static file through hundreds of servers instead of slogging through a single host. This "smart route" technology distributes your content to your visitors via the city closest to them. ...

cURL alternatives & related posts

Postman logo

Postman

94.1K
80.6K
1.8K
Only complete API development environment
94.1K
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PROS OF POSTMAN
  • 490
    Easy to use
  • 369
    Great tool
  • 276
    Makes developing rest api's easy peasy
  • 156
    Easy setup, looks good
  • 144
    The best api workflow out there
  • 53
    It's the best
  • 53
    History feature
  • 44
    Adds real value to my workflow
  • 43
    Great interface that magically predicts your needs
  • 35
    The best in class app
  • 12
    Can save and share script
  • 10
    Fully featured without looking cluttered
  • 8
    Collections
  • 8
    Option to run scrips
  • 8
    Global/Environment Variables
  • 7
    Shareable Collections
  • 7
    Dead simple and useful. Excellent
  • 7
    Dark theme easy on the eyes
  • 6
    Awesome customer support
  • 6
    Great integration with newman
  • 5
    Documentation
  • 5
    Simple
  • 5
    The test script is useful
  • 4
    Saves responses
  • 4
    This has simplified my testing significantly
  • 4
    Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
  • 4
    Easy as pie
  • 3
    API-network
  • 3
    I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
  • 3
    Mocking API calls with predefined response
  • 2
    Now supports GraphQL
  • 2
    Postman Runner CI Integration
  • 2
    Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
  • 2
    Continuous integration using newman
  • 2
    Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
  • 2
    Runner
  • 2
    Graph
  • 1
    <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>
CONS OF POSTMAN
  • 10
    Stores credentials in HTTP
  • 9
    Bloated features and UI
  • 8
    Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
  • 7
    Poor GraphQL support
  • 5
    Expensive
  • 3
    Not free after 5 users
  • 3
    Can't prompt for per-request variables
  • 1
    Import swagger
  • 1
    Support websocket
  • 1
    Import curl

related Postman posts

Noah Zoschke
Engineering Manager at Segment · | 30 upvotes · 2.9M views

We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.

Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username, password and workspace_name so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.

Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.

This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.

Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct

Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.

Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.

See more
Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 27 upvotes · 4.9M views

Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:

  • Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
  • npm as package manager
  • NestJS as Node.js framework
  • TypeScript as programming language
  • ExpressJS as web server
  • Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
  • Postman as a tool for API development
  • TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
  • JSON Web Token for access token management

The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:

  • Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
  • Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
  • A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
  • Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.
See more
HTTPie logo

HTTPie

62
61
0
A command-line HTTP client made for APIs
62
61
+ 1
0
PROS OF HTTPIE
    Be the first to leave a pro
    CONS OF HTTPIE
    • 1
      No support for HTTP/2

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    Google Drive logo

    Google Drive

    81.5K
    67.8K
    2.1K
    A safe place for all your files
    81.5K
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    PROS OF GOOGLE DRIVE
    • 505
      Easy to use
    • 326
      Gmail integration
    • 312
      Enough free space
    • 268
      Collaboration
    • 249
      Stable service
    • 128
      Desktop and mobile apps
    • 97
      Offline sync
    • 79
      Apps
    • 74
      15 gb storage
    • 50
      Add-ons
    • 9
      Integrates well
    • 6
      Easy to use
    • 3
      Simple back-up tool
    • 2
      Amazing
    • 2
      Beautiful
    • 2
      Fast upload speeds
    • 2
      The more the merrier
    • 2
      So easy
    • 2
      Wonderful
    • 2
      Linux terminal transfer tools
    • 2
      It has grown to a stable in the cloud office
    • 1
      UI
    • 1
      Windows desktop
    • 1
      G Suite integration
    CONS OF GOOGLE DRIVE
    • 7
      Organization via web ui sucks
    • 2
      Not a real database

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    Tom Klein

    Google Analytics is a great tool to analyze your traffic. To debug our software and ask questions, we love to use Postman and Stack Overflow. Google Drive helps our team to share documents. We're able to build our great products through the APIs by Google Maps, CloudFlare, Stripe, PayPal, Twilio, Let's Encrypt, and TensorFlow.

    See more
    Shared insights
    on
    Google DriveGoogle DriveDropboxDropbox

    I created a simple upload/download functionality for a web application and connected it to Mongo, now I can upload, store and download files. I need advice on how to create a SPA similar to Dropbox or Google Drive in that it will be a hierarchy of folders with files within them, how would I go about creating this structure and adding this functionality to all the files within the application?

    Intuitively creating a react component and adding it to a File object seems like the way to go, what are some issues to expect and how do I go about creating such an application to be as fast and UI-friendly as possible?

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    CloudFlare logo

    CloudFlare

    76.4K
    22.4K
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    The Web Performance & Security Company.
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    PROS OF CLOUDFLARE
    • 424
      Easy setup, great cdn
    • 277
      Free ssl
    • 199
      Easy setup
    • 190
      Security
    • 180
      Ssl
    • 98
      Great cdn
    • 77
      Optimizer
    • 71
      Simple
    • 44
      Great UI
    • 28
      Great js cdn
    • 12
      Apps
    • 12
      HTTP/2 Support
    • 12
      DNS Analytics
    • 12
      AutoMinify
    • 9
      Rocket Loader
    • 9
      Ipv6
    • 9
      Easy
    • 8
      IPv6 "One Click"
    • 8
      Fantastic CDN service
    • 7
      DNSSEC
    • 7
      Nice DNS
    • 7
      SSHFP
    • 7
      Free GeoIP
    • 7
      Amazing performance
    • 7
      API
    • 7
      Cheapest SSL
    • 6
      SPDY
    • 6
      Free and reliable, Faster then anyone else
    • 5
      Ubuntu
    • 5
      Asynchronous resource loading
    • 4
      Global Load Balancing
    • 4
      Performance
    • 4
      Easy Use
    • 3
      CDN
    • 2
      Registrar
    • 2
      Support for SSHFP records
    • 1
      Web3
    • 1
      Прохси
    • 1
      HTTPS3/Quic
    CONS OF CLOUDFLARE
    • 2
      No support for SSHFP records
    • 2
      Expensive when you exceed their fair usage limits

    related CloudFlare posts

    Tom Klein

    Google Analytics is a great tool to analyze your traffic. To debug our software and ask questions, we love to use Postman and Stack Overflow. Google Drive helps our team to share documents. We're able to build our great products through the APIs by Google Maps, CloudFlare, Stripe, PayPal, Twilio, Let's Encrypt, and TensorFlow.

    See more
    Johnny Bell

    When I first built my portfolio I used GitHub for the source control and deployed directly to Netlify on a push to master. This was a perfect setup, I didn't need any knowledge about #DevOps or anything, it was all just done for me.

    One of the issues I had with Netlify was I wanted to gzip my JavaScript files, I had this setup in my #Webpack file, however Netlify didn't offer an easy way to set this.

    Over the weekend I decided I wanted to know more about how #DevOps worked so I decided to switch from Netlify to Amazon S3. Instead of creating any #Git Webhooks I decided to use Buddy for my pipeline and to run commands. Buddy is a fantastic tool, very easy to setup builds, copying the files to my Amazon S3 bucket, then running some #AWS console commands to set the content-encoding of the JavaScript files. - Buddy is also free if you only have a few pipelines, so I didn't need to pay anything 🤙🏻.

    When I made these changes I also wanted to monitor my code, and make sure I was keeping up with the best practices so I implemented Code Climate to look over my code and tell me where there code smells, issues, and other issues I've been super happy with it so far, on the free tier so its also free.

    I did plan on using Amazon CloudFront for my SSL and cacheing, however it was overly complex to setup and it costs money. So I decided to go with the free tier of CloudFlare and it is amazing, best choice I've made for caching / SSL in a long time.

    See more
    Dropbox logo

    Dropbox

    23.2K
    18.1K
    1.7K
    Build the power of Dropbox into your apps
    23.2K
    18.1K
    + 1
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    PROS OF DROPBOX
    • 434
      Easy to work with
    • 256
      Free
    • 216
      Popular
    • 176
      Shared file hosting
    • 167
      'just works'
    • 100
      No brainer
    • 79
      Integration with external services
    • 76
      Simple
    • 49
      Good api
    • 38
      Least cost (free) for the basic needs case
    • 11
      It just works
    • 8
      Convenient
    • 7
      Accessible from all of my devices
    • 5
      Command Line client
    • 4
      Synchronizing laptop and desktop - work anywhere
    • 4
      Can even be used by your grandma
    • 3
      Reliable
    • 3
      Sync API
    • 3
      Mac app
    • 3
      Cross platform app
    • 2
      Ability to pay monthly without losing your files
    • 2
      Delta synchronization
    • 2
      Everybody needs to share and synchronize files reliably
    • 2
      Backups, local and cloud
    • 2
      Extended version history
    • 2
      Beautiful UI
    • 1
      YC Company
    • 1
      What a beautiful app
    • 1
      Easy/no setup
    • 1
      So easy
    • 1
      The more the merrier
    • 1
      Easy to work with
    • 1
      For when client needs file without opening firewall
    • 1
      Everybody needs to share and synchronize files reliabl
    • 1
      Easy to use
    • 1
      Official Linux app
    • 0
      The more the merrier
    CONS OF DROPBOX
    • 3
      Personal vs company account is confusing
    • 1
      Replication kills CPU and battery

    related Dropbox posts

    Shared insights
    on
    Google DriveGoogle DriveDropboxDropbox

    I created a simple upload/download functionality for a web application and connected it to Mongo, now I can upload, store and download files. I need advice on how to create a SPA similar to Dropbox or Google Drive in that it will be a hierarchy of folders with files within them, how would I go about creating this structure and adding this functionality to all the files within the application?

    Intuitively creating a react component and adding it to a File object seems like the way to go, what are some issues to expect and how do I go about creating such an application to be as fast and UI-friendly as possible?

    See more
    Shared insights
    on
    BoxBoxDropboxDropboxKloudlessKloudless

    Anyone recommend a good connector like Kloudless for connecting a SaaS app to Dropbox/Box etc? Cheers

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    Amazon CloudFront logo

    Amazon CloudFront

    21.2K
    10.7K
    935
    Content delivery with low latency and high data transfer speeds
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    935
    PROS OF AMAZON CLOUDFRONT
    • 245
      Fast
    • 166
      Cdn
    • 157
      Compatible with other aws services
    • 125
      Simple
    • 108
      Global
    • 41
      Cheap
    • 36
      Cost-effective
    • 27
      Reliable
    • 19
      One stop solution
    • 9
      Elastic
    • 1
      Object store
    • 1
      HTTP/2 Support
    CONS OF AMAZON CLOUDFRONT
    • 3
      UI could use some work
    • 1
      Invalidations take so long

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    Russel Werner
    Lead Engineer at StackShare · | 32 upvotes · 2.6M views

    StackShare Feed is built entirely with React, Glamorous, and Apollo. One of our objectives with the public launch of the Feed was to enable a Server-side rendered (SSR) experience for our organic search traffic. When you visit the StackShare Feed, and you aren't logged in, you are delivered the Trending feed experience. We use an in-house Node.js rendering microservice to generate this HTML. This microservice needs to run and serve requests independent of our Rails web app. Up until recently, we had a mono-repo with our Rails and React code living happily together and all served from the same web process. In order to deploy our SSR app into a Heroku environment, we needed to split out our front-end application into a separate repo in GitHub. The driving factor in this decision was mostly due to limitations imposed by Heroku specifically with how processes can't communicate with each other. A new SSR app was created in Heroku and linked directly to the frontend repo so it stays in-sync with changes.

    Related to this, we need a way to "deploy" our frontend changes to various server environments without building & releasing the entire Ruby application. We built a hybrid Amazon S3 Amazon CloudFront solution to host our Webpack bundles. A new CircleCI script builds the bundles and uploads them to S3. The final step in our rollout is to update some keys in Redis so our Rails app knows which bundles to serve. The result of these efforts were significant. Our frontend team now moves independently of our backend team, our build & release process takes only a few minutes, we are now using an edge CDN to serve JS assets, and we have pre-rendered React pages!

    #StackDecisionsLaunch #SSR #Microservices #FrontEndRepoSplit

    See more
    Julien DeFrance
    Principal Software Engineer at Tophatter · | 16 upvotes · 3.2M views

    Back in 2014, I was given an opportunity to re-architect SmartZip Analytics platform, and flagship product: SmartTargeting. This is a SaaS software helping real estate professionals keeping up with their prospects and leads in a given neighborhood/territory, finding out (thanks to predictive analytics) who's the most likely to list/sell their home, and running cross-channel marketing automation against them: direct mail, online ads, email... The company also does provide Data APIs to Enterprise customers.

    I had inherited years and years of technical debt and I knew things had to change radically. The first enabler to this was to make use of the cloud and go with AWS, so we would stop re-inventing the wheel, and build around managed/scalable services.

    For the SaaS product, we kept on working with Rails as this was what my team had the most knowledge in. We've however broken up the monolith and decoupled the front-end application from the backend thanks to the use of Rails API so we'd get independently scalable micro-services from now on.

    Our various applications could now be deployed using AWS Elastic Beanstalk so we wouldn't waste any more efforts writing time-consuming Capistrano deployment scripts for instance. Combined with Docker so our application would run within its own container, independently from the underlying host configuration.

    Storage-wise, we went with Amazon S3 and ditched any pre-existing local or network storage people used to deal with in our legacy systems. On the database side: Amazon RDS / MySQL initially. Ultimately migrated to Amazon RDS for Aurora / MySQL when it got released. Once again, here you need a managed service your cloud provider handles for you.

    Future improvements / technology decisions included:

    Caching: Amazon ElastiCache / Memcached CDN: Amazon CloudFront Systems Integration: Segment / Zapier Data-warehousing: Amazon Redshift BI: Amazon Quicksight / Superset Search: Elasticsearch / Amazon Elasticsearch Service / Algolia Monitoring: New Relic

    As our usage grows, patterns changed, and/or our business needs evolved, my role as Engineering Manager then Director of Engineering was also to ensure my team kept on learning and innovating, while delivering on business value.

    One of these innovations was to get ourselves into Serverless : Adopting AWS Lambda was a big step forward. At the time, only available for Node.js (Not Ruby ) but a great way to handle cost efficiency, unpredictable traffic, sudden bursts of traffic... Ultimately you want the whole chain of services involved in a call to be serverless, and that's when we've started leveraging Amazon DynamoDB on these projects so they'd be fully scalable.

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    Akamai logo

    Akamai

    1.9K
    439
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    The leading platform for cloud, mobile, media and security across any device, anywhere.
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    439
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        MaxCDN logo

        MaxCDN

        1.6K
        553
        100
        Our CDN makes your site load faster!
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        100
        PROS OF MAXCDN
        • 47
          Easy setup
        • 33
          Speed to my clients
        • 15
          Great service & Customer Support
        • 5
          Shared and Affordable SSL
        CONS OF MAXCDN
          Be the first to leave a con

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          Justin Dorfman
          Open Source Program Manager at Reblaze · | 4 upvotes · 238.6K views

          When my SSL cert MaxCDN was expiring on my personal site I decided it was a good time to revamp some things. Since GitHub Services is depreciated I can no longer have #CDN cache purges automated among other things. So I decided on the following: GitHub Pages, Netlify, Let's Encrypt and Jekyll. Staying the same was Bootstrap, jQuery, Grunt & #GoogleFonts.

          What's awesome about GitHub Pages is that it has a #CDN (Fastly) built-in and anytime you push to master, it purges the cache instantaneously without you have to do anything special. Netlify is magic, I highly recommend it to anyone using #StaticSiteGenerators.

          For the most part, everything went smoothly. The only things I had issues with were the following:

          • If you want to point www to GitHub Pages you need to rename the repo to www
          • If you edit something in the _config.yml you need to restart bundle exec jekyll s or changes won't show
          • I had to disable the Grunt htmlmin module. I replaced it with Jekyll layout that compresses HTML for #webperf

          Last but certainly not least, I made a donation to Let's Encrypt. If you use their service consider doing it too: https://letsencrypt.org/donate/

          See more
          Todd Gardner

          We migrated the hosting of our CDN, which is used to serve the JavaScript Error collection agent, from Amazon CloudFront to MaxCDN. During our test, we found MaxCDN to be more reliable and less expensive for serving he file.

          The reports and controls were also considerably better.

          See more