Async HTTP Clients: aiohttp vs httpx

As Python developers, we often need to make HTTP requests to access APIs and web services. When building asynchronous applications, the choice of HTTP client library is important. Two popular async HTTP client libraries for Python are aiohttp and httpx. In this article, we'll compare these two libraries and look at when you may prefer one over the other.

Overview

aiohttp is a well-established HTTP client library that has been around since 2014. It supports both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2, and can be used for both client and server code.

httpx is a newer HTTP client that builds on the learnings from requests and aiohttp. It focuses exclusively on the client side, providing an easy to use client API. httpx supports both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2, and has a number of handy features for building robust HTTP clients.

Key Differences

Here are some of the key differences between aiohttp and httpx that may influence which one you choose:

So in summary, httpx focuses on being an easy-to-use, robust and full-featured HTTP client, whereas aiohttp is a more low-level client/server library optimized for performance.

Example Usage

Here is some example code showing a simple GET request with both libraries:

import aiohttp
import httpx

async def aiohttp_get(url):
    async with aiohttp.ClientSession() as session:
        async with session.get(url) as response:
            return response 

async def httpx_get(url):
    async with httpx.AsyncClient() as client:
        response = await client.get(url)
        return response  

As you can see, httpx aims for a simpler and more Pythonic API.

Features

Let's explore some of the features of these libraries in more depth:

Timeouts

httpx uses Python's standard Timeout context manager for timeout logic:

with httpx.Timeout(1.0):
   response = client.get(url)

Whereas aiohttp has custom timeout implementations. This makes httpx's timeout handling easier to reason about.

HTTP/2 Support

Both libraries support HTTP/2, but there are some differences:

So if you need full HTTP/2 support, httpx is likely the better choice.

Proxy Support

httpx provides built-in proxy support, including authentication. This makes it straightforward to make requests through a proxy:

client = httpx.AsyncClient(proxies="http://user:pass@10.10.1.10:3128/")

aiohttp requires additional packages like aiohttp-proxy to provide this functionality.

Limits

aiohttp imposes limits on things like the maximum number of concurrent connections, to avoid resource exhaustion.

In contrast, httpx does not impose any limits, so you need to be careful to avoid overloading resources. But this does make httpx simpler for the common case when you are making a low/moderate number of requests.

Performance

Both aiohttp and httpx have excellent performance for an async HTTP client. Some benchmarks have shown httpx to have faster HTTP/1.1 performance than aiohttp in some scenarios.

However performance should not be the only consideration - make sure to evaluate each library against your specific requirements.

Conclusion

The choice between aiohttp and httpx ultimately depends on your specific needs.

Some key points:

The good news is that both are excellent choices, so you can't go wrong. Evaluate each against your specific application's needs.

I hope this gives you a good overview of how these two popular async HTTP clients compare!