gRPC VS Async Http Client

Compare gRPC vs Async Http Client and see what are their differences.

gRPC

The Java gRPC implementation. HTTP/2 based RPC (by grpc)

Async Http Client

Asynchronous Http and WebSocket Client library for Java (by AsyncHttpClient)
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gRPC Async Http Client
14 1
11,832 6,391
0.4% 0.3%
9.6 8.2
4 days ago 6 days ago
Java Java
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

gRPC

Posts with mentions or reviews of gRPC. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-06-28.
  • MCP: An (Accidentally) Universal Plugin System
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Jun 2025
    It's not enabled by default, but you can --- gRPC Reflection:

    * https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/blob/master/documentation/...

    * https://grpc.io/docs/guides/reflection/

    You can then use generic tools like grpc_cli or grpcurl to list available services and methods, and call them.

  • Using gRPC for (local) inter-process communication – F. Werner's Research Page
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Nov 2024
  • gRPC: The Bad Parts
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Jun 2024
    > Except for our most used language, Java.

    The official Java implementation of grpc looks like abandonware. Out of the box the builder includes an annotation (javax.annotation.Generated) that was deprecated in 2019:

    https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/issues/9179

    This gives me serious pause.

  • FLaNK Stack Weekly 12 February 2024
    52 projects | dev.to | 12 Feb 2024
  • Reference Count, Don't Garbage Collect
    1 project | /r/programming | 1 Aug 2022
    That's not true at all. Case in point In general, this is not a problem that AGC can solve. The language can help (something Java is admittedly particularly bad at) but even so, there'll always be avenues for leaks. That's just the nature of shared things. Interestingly, in the linked grpc case, the leaked memory is only half the problem -- AGC doesn't help at all with the leaked HTTP2 connection.
  • Distroless Alpine
    4 projects | dev.to | 10 May 2022
    I've trialled my new image with an existing project via JLink that's heavy on Netty and gRPC the image works great (with a small tweak to exclude grpc-netty-shaded due to grpc-java#9083).
  • What are the user agents?
    1 project | /r/learnprogramming | 12 Mar 2022
    When developing an application, the vast majority of code is written by other people. We import that code and make use of it to get whatever we need done. In this case, the developer of an various android applications are using grpc-java.
  • Buf raises $93M to deprecate REST/JSON
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Dec 2021
    `proto_library` for building the `.bin` file from protos works great. Generating stubs/messages for "all" languages does not. Each language does not want to implement gRPC rules, the gRPC team does not want to implement rules for each language. Sort of a deadlock situation. For example:

    - C++: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/cc_grpc_libra...

    - Python: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/python_rules....

    - ObjC: https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/bazel/objc_grpc_lib...

    - Java: https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/blob/master/java_grpc_libr...

    - Go (different semantics than all of the other): https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/blob/master/proto/def...

    But there's also no real cohesion within the community. The biggest effort to date has been in https://github.com/stackb/rules_proto which integrates with gazelle.

    tl;dr: Low alignment results in diverging implementations that are complicated to understand for newcomers. Buff's approach is much more appealing as it's a "this is the one way to do the right thing" and having it just work by detecting `proto_library` and doing all of the linting/registry stuff automagically in CI would be fantastic.

  • grpc_bench: open-source, objective gRPC benchmark
    3 projects | /r/grpc | 20 Apr 2021
    Small clarification (to my understanding, I'm not a Java Guru) on why Java got on top - those Java implementations use something called Direct Executor. It's super performant when there's no chance of a blocking operation. But if you are to do anything more than echo service, you might be in trouble. Other implementations probably don't suffer from the same constraint. The related discussion can be found in this PR.
  • Android Java GRPC Tutorial
    1 project | dev.to | 22 Feb 2021
    clone https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java

Async Http Client

Posts with mentions or reviews of Async Http Client. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-03-29.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing gRPC and Async Http Client you can also consider the following projects:

Netty - Netty project - an event-driven asynchronous network application framework

OkHttp - Square’s meticulous HTTP client for the JVM, Android, and GraalVM.

Finagle - A fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system

Retrofit - A type-safe HTTP client for Android and the JVM

Dubbo - The java implementation of Apache Dubbo. An RPC and microservice framework.

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