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)
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
featured
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com
featured
OkHttp gRPC
52 13
46,383 11,741
0.3% 0.7%
9.3 9.6
2 days ago 1 day 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 2025-05-10.
  • What is OkHttp? Exploring Open Source Funding, Licensing, and Community Engagement
    2 projects | dev.to | 10 May 2025
    This post dives into the evolution of OkHttp––a widely used Java HTTP client––focusing on its open source business model, funding strategies, licensing under Apache 2.0, and strong community engagement. We discuss key concepts and features, explore practical applications, analyze challenges, and forecast future trends in open source sustainability. In doing so, we compare OkHttp’s model with emerging tokenized and decentralized funding approaches. Along the way, we include references to authoritative resources (such as Square’s OkHttp GitHub repository and the official OkHttp website), as well as insightful discussions from various developer communities.
  • 안드로이드 앱의 API 응답 캐싱
    3 projects | dev.to | 31 Mar 2025
  • OkHttp: The HTTP Client That Will Blow Your Mind!
    1 project | dev.to | 7 Mar 2025
    View the Project on GitHub
  • Unveiling Open Source Success: The Inspiring Story of OkHttp
    2 projects | dev.to | 6 Mar 2025
    OkHttp shines not only as a tool but also as a case study in sustainable open source practices. By combining consistent funding with a culture of open collaboration, Square has created an environment where rapid innovation meets robust quality assurance. With extensive documentation available on the official OkHttp website, developers worldwide can learn best practices and integrate OkHttp into their projects with ease. Furthermore, the thriving community around OkHttp has provided a rich repository of tutorials, performance benchmarks, and case studies. This collaborative approach not only accelerates problem-solving but also ensures that the tool evolves in tandem with emerging industry trends. As alternative funding models, including tokenized systems, gain traction in the open source arena, OkHttp continues to stand as a testament to the efficacy of conventional corporate-backed contributions.
  • Comprehensive Guide to OkHttp for Java and Kotlin
    1 project | dev.to | 5 Dec 2024
    When building applications that communicate over the web, a reliable and efficient HTTP client is essential. OkHttp, one of the most popular HTTP clients for Java and Android development, stands out as a powerful tool for handling network operations.
  • Tutorial: Build a Java SDK based on OpenAPI Spec
    16 projects | dev.to | 27 Sep 2024
    Your SDK will need a reliable HTTP client to interact with APIs. For Java, consider HttpClient from the standard library or popular libraries like OkHttp if you need more flexibility.
  • OpenSSL bug exposed up to 255 bytes of server heap and existed since 2011
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jul 2024
    > Issue summary: Calling the OpenSSL API function SSL_select_next_proto with an empty supported client protocols buffer may cause a crash or memory contents to be sent to the peer.

    BoringSSL fix: https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl/+/c1d9ac02514a1...

    The heap leak was independently observed in 2014 in the Android okhttp library: https://github.com/square/okhttp/issues/437#issuecomment-358...

  • Consuming and Testing third party API's using Spring Webclient
    4 projects | dev.to | 19 Feb 2024
    We will use Square’s Mock Webserver to spin up a mock server which we can use to simulate real api's request to the get coffee endpoint.
  • Chat with any GPT right through your favorite text editor
    3 projects | dev.to | 27 Dec 2023
    OkHttp Documentation
  • Is there a server simulator available for testing API endpoints with low code or no code configuration?
    1 project | /r/java | 26 Sep 2023
    mockwebserver -> https://github.com/square/okhttp/tree/master/mockwebserver

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 2024-11-20.
  • 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
  • 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.

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.

Finagle - A fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system

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

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

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

InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
featured
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
www.saashub.com
featured

Did you know that Kotlin is
the 17th most popular programming language
based on number of references?