I don't have elaborate needs and have used Charles for many years. A few years ago I switched to https://proxyman.com and found it easier to use.
I don't have elaborate needs and have used Charles for many years. A few years ago I switched to https://proxyman.com and found it easier to use.
Proxyman is 100x value for 2x the price. I am not even kidding. Native UI, shortcuts, cert installation helper tools. And script editor to programmatically edit requests is so much better and powerful than Charles' request editor.
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Likewise. I was a dedicated user of Charles for about a decade. It’s great, but if you are a macOS user, Proxyman is better, easier, and more macOS friendly.
At a previous workplace, Charles Proxy was not in the list of approved software. I don't recall the reason - it might have been cost, but we used lots of paid tools, and since it was in the restricted category, we couldn't pick and use (we handled a copious amount of Western PII, from reading, working on it, to storing it). Two were approved: Requestly and another was a link to an internal wiki with a really "interesting" process involving Wireshark and whatnot. Needless to say, that doc was one of the most clicked and least read. I tried Charles at a later place that offered a license, and I went back to Requestly, which I really found to be more straightforward or simpler to use.
It is the same thing though?
Charles is a http proxy, Requestly judging by the landing page is a http client like Postman.
While as a mobile dev most of my usage were limited to api client kinda usage I did use it for debugging traffic and hence its intercepting features. Haven’t checked their landing page or the tool itself in a long time (or any coding for that matter) so not sure.
"approved use" is usually just someone that doesn't understand what the software does.
I recently had the IT team at my work ban VNC client, they didn't understand it wasn't VNC server, which I could understand being a security risk, but the client? They're idiots.
If the devs behind Charles would just tweak their UI a bit, it would be the absolute perfect tool. Functionally it pretty much already is. Mainly being able to turn on and off and configuring features I use all the time (rewrite, map local, map remote) is always a journey through menu's that don't always make sense. The only functional thing I'm missing is some DNS stuff (e.g. throttling or breaking DNS specifically).
I tried using proxyman for a while, and while definitely powerful and more modern, it honestly didn't feel "better" or more powerful so I didn't go for yet another license.
I frequently use them both. The main reason why I can't leave Charles is the lack of session grouping in Proxyman. Seeing a huge list of irrelevant items is annoying after some point. In Charles, I can save that session with a name and move on to something else. It's almost impossible to leave one for the other at this point for me.
This goes without saying, but huge thanks to the both developers for making these available.
Same. At some point there was a new Charles version and I could not figure out how to use it the way I had used the old version (I admit I forget exactly what I was trying to do), and it was trivial in Proxyman. Proxyman also has a great app.
Pretty nice.
Does it work for Xcode simulators?
I use Charles extensively (I am using it for the development I’m doing right now), and it needs to work on simulators.
Cost isn’t an issue for me. Fitness to purpose is important. I won’t cripple my development capacity, in order to save $50.
It makes working with Xcode simulators even easier by having a dedicated UI workflow to install the proxy certificates and restart the sim. I used to face issues from time to time doing this with Charles having to restart my machine at times and not getting the certificates to work. Proxyman makes this way nicer to work with and since switching I never faced certificate issues again.
Not trying to do an ad, but really glad I don‘t have to think about that anymore :)
Yes, Proxyman has great sim integration, including the ability to filter by apps within the sim. It's a far better macOS app than Charles, and I've never found it to be lacking a feature I used in Charles.
Cool. I appreciate the tip. I’ll give it a go.
Thanks!
When I was still working with iOS, all of us on the team switched to Proxyman and found it much better than Charles. Developer experience wise that is (features, ui/ux, etc.) We ran into some issues with Charles and found Proxyman as the alternative. Don't remember the issues but we never looked back.
It does. I find the UI better and setting it up easier too
I went from charles to mitmproxy to proxyman and am currently using Reqable. Something all of these miss imo is a way to modify TLS handshakes.
Is anyone else having trouble loading the proxyman website? (Firefox, Windows 11) - it freezes the entire browser..
Check your browser extensions
Looks much better, thanks for that tip
That it's an osx ONLY app.
MacOS, iOS, Windows, and Linux
I was going to comment on the Mac exclusivity too which might be a bad idea now that Linux is on the rise. But you're right, there's a Linux beta too now. Thanks for the pointer.