furl vs requests

Side-by-side — pricing, strengths, tradeoffs, and fit.

furl

A small Python library for easy URL parsing and manipulation.

requests

HTTP Requests for Humans.

At a glance

Open SourceFree Tier
● Established·From $0
Open SourceFree Tier
● Established·From $0

Overview

One-liner

A small Python library for easy URL parsing and manipulation.

One-liner

HTTP Requests for Humans.

Maturity

Established

Maturity

Established

Open source

✓ Yes

Open source

✓ Yes

Pricing

Free tier

✓ Available

Open source — free to use

Free tier

✓ Available

Open source — free to use

Starts at

$0

Starts at

$0

Model

Flat rate

Model

Flat rate

Enterprise

✕ None

Enterprise

✕ None

Best for

✓ Best for

Developers working on Python-based web scraping projects who need to handle complex URL operations
Python developers building APIs that require dynamic URL construction and manipulation

✓ Best for

Developers who need a simple and intuitive way to make HTTP requests in their Python projects.
Web developers automating interactions with web services or APIs.
Pythonistas looking for an easy-to-use library for handling cookies, headers, and redirects.

Not ideal for

✕ Not for

Projects requiring extensive URL handling in languages other than Python
Applications where a full-featured web framework is required for URL routing

✕ Not for

Projects requiring complex network operations that go beyond basic HTTP requests.
Developers needing a full-featured framework for building web applications.

Strengths

↑ Strengths

Simplifies URL parsing and manipulation
Supports easy construction of URLs
Handles complex URL operations with ease

↑ Strengths

Easy-to-use API for making HTTP requests.
Automatic handling of cookies, headers, and redirects.
Supports sessions with persistent parameters.
Built-in JSON encoding/decoding.

Weaknesses

↓ Weaknesses

Limited language support
Small community and limited documentation
Potential performance overhead for simple URL operations

↓ Weaknesses

Session.verify=False is ignored when the REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE environment variable is set, causing SSL verification failures despite explicit configuration.
The library does not respect the no_proxy environment variable or proxies['no'] parameter, forcing requests through proxies even for whitelisted URLs.
Requests suffers from a memory leak when using sessions with proxies, causing programs to consume all RAM until they stop working.
The presence of the simplejson library causes requests to fail when using standard json.JSONDecoder due to inconsistent argument handling.
Full furl profile →Full requests profile →