urllib3 vs requests

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

urllib3

A HTTP library with thread-safe connection pooling and file post support.

requests

HTTP Requests for Humans.

At a glance

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

Overview

One-liner

A HTTP library with thread-safe connection pooling and file post support.

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 needing a robust and thread-safe HTTP client for Python
Projects requiring efficient connection pooling to manage multiple requests
Applications that need to handle file uploads via HTTP POST

✓ 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

Scenarios where a full-featured web framework with built-in HTTP capabilities is preferred over a standalone library
Use cases requiring non-Python language support, as urllib3 is Python-specific

✕ 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

Thread-safe connection pooling
File posting support
Robust error handling and retries
SSL certificate verification

↑ 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

Lack of comprehensive documentation
Performance issues under heavy load
Limited support for modern HTTP/2 features

↓ 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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