httpx vs requests

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

httpx

A next generation HTTP client for Python.

requests

HTTP Requests for Humans.

At a glance

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

Overview

One-liner

A next generation HTTP client for Python.

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 building modern, high-performance HTTP clients for their applications
Teams requiring both synchronous and asynchronous HTTP requests within the same project

✓ 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 that require a web UI or platform-based interaction with HTTP services
Applications needing extensive customization beyond what httpx offers out-of-the-box

✕ 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

Support for both synchronous and asynchronous operations
Automatic handling of redirects, retries, and timeouts
Built-in support for HTTP/2 and HTTP/1.1

↑ 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 documentation for advanced features
Performance issues under heavy load

↓ 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.
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