OkHttp VS gRPC

Compare OkHttp vs gRPC and see what are their differences.

OkHttp

Square’s meticulous HTTP client for the JVM, Android, and GraalVM. (by square)

gRPC

The Java gRPC implementation. HTTP/2 based RPC (by grpc)
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OkHttp gRPC
43 11
45,230 11,162
0.3% 0.9%
9.3 9.6
7 days ago 6 days ago
Kotlin Java
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
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.

OkHttp

Posts with mentions or reviews of OkHttp. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-19.

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 2024-02-12.
  • 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
  • GRPC
    2 projects | /r/grpc | 16 Feb 2021
    If you do streaming then the best option would be to use a so called manual flow control. You can find an example here.
  • High performing APIs with gRPC
    2 projects | /r/programming | 25 Jan 2021
    Another interesting link is their official grpc-java benchmarks project, which is also used in the benchmark I've posted you.
  • Java 16 EA Alpine & JLink vs Graal
    1 project | dev.to | 17 Jan 2021
    Both JLink (gRPC#3522) and Graal have some issues; I'm especially concerned about the Serial GC in Graal so will be putting that under some stress soon to see if that confirms my suspicions. I'll also be good when some Java 16 JRE Alpine images appear as the JDK is too bloaty.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing OkHttp and gRPC you can also consider the following projects:

unirest-java - Unirest in Java: Simplified, lightweight HTTP client library.

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

Async Http Client - Asynchronous Http and WebSocket Client library for Java

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

Finagle - A fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system

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

Undertow - High performance non-blocking webserver

Android Volley

KryoNet - TCP/UDP client/server library for Java, based on Kryo

android-async-http - An asynchronous, callback-based Http client for Android built on top of Apache's HttpClient libraries.