Charles vs Retrofit

Overview

Charles

Stacks140

Followers167

Votes0

Retrofit

Stacks386

Followers198

Votes0

GitHub Stars43.8K

Forks7.3K

Charles vs Retrofit: What are the differences?

Charles: HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy. 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; Retrofit: A type-safe HTTP client for Android and Java. Retrofit turns your HTTP API into a Java interface.

Charles and Retrofit can be primarily classified as "API" tools.

Some of the features offered by Charles are:

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

On the other hand, Retrofit provides the following key features:

URL parameter replacement and query parameter support
Object conversion to request body (e.g., JSON, protocol buffers)
Multipart request body and file upload

Retrofit is an open source tool with 33K GitHub stars and 6.13K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Retrofit's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Charles has a broader approval, being mentioned in 16 company stacks & 13 developers stacks; compared to Retrofit, which is listed in 19 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Charles	Retrofit
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.	Retrofit turns your HTTP API into a Java interface
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	URL parameter replacement and query parameter support; Object conversion to request body (e.g., JSON, protocol buffers); Multipart request body and file upload
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 43.8K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 7.3K
Stacks 140	Stacks 386
Followers 167	Followers 198
Votes 0	Votes 0

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