niquests - Niquests is a simple, yet elegant, HTTP library. It is a drop-in replacement for Requests, which is under feature freeze.

Niquests is a simple, yet elegant, HTTP library. It is a drop-in replacement for Requests, which is under feature freeze. ✨ Were you used to betamax, requests-mock, responses, ...? See how they still work! We got you covered.

Niquests, is the “Safest, Fastest[^10], Easiest, and Most advanced” Python HTTP Client. Production Ready!

Live Benchmark

Target: https://httpbingo.org/get
Conditions: All default parameters, one shared session, everything simultaneously.
HTTP/2 when supported.

👆 Look at the feature table comparison against requests, httpx and aiohttp!

Feature	niquests	requests	httpx	aiohttp
`HTTP/1.1`	✅	✅	✅	✅
`HTTP/2`	✅	❌	✅[^7]	❌
`HTTP/3 over QUIC`	✅	❌	❌	❌
`Synchronous`	✅	✅	✅	N/A[^1]
`Asynchronous`	✅	❌	✅	✅
`Thread Safe`	✅	✅	❌[^5]	N/A[^1]
`Task Safe`	✅	N/A[^2]	✅	✅
`OS Trust Store`	✅	❌	❌	❌
`Multiplexing`	✅	❌	Limited[^3]	❌
`DNSSEC`	✅[^11]	❌	❌	❌
`Customizable DNS Resolution`	✅	❌	❌	✅
`DNS over HTTPS`	✅	❌	❌	❌
`DNS over QUIC`	✅	❌	❌	❌
`DNS over TLS`	✅	❌	❌	❌
`Multiple DNS Resolver`	✅	❌	❌	❌
`Network Fine Tuning & Inspect`	✅	❌	Limited[^6]	Limited[^6]
`Certificate Revocation Protection`	✅	❌	❌	❌
`Session Persistence`	✅	✅	✅	✅
`In-memory Certificate CA & mTLS`	✅	❌	Limited[^4]	Limited[^4]
`SOCKS 4/5 Proxies`	✅	✅	✅	❌
`HTTP/HTTPS Proxies`	✅	✅	✅	✅
`TLS-in-TLS Support`	✅	✅	✅	✅
`Direct HTTP/3 Negotiation`	✅[^9]	N/A[^8]	N/A[^8]	N/A[^8]
`Happy Eyeballs`	✅	❌	❌	✅
`Package / SLSA Signed`	✅	❌	❌	✅
`HTTP/2 with prior knowledge (h2c)`	✅	❌	✅	❌
`Post-Quantum Security & ECH`	✅ [^12]	❌	❌	❌
`HTTP Trailers`	✅	❌	❌	❌
`Early Responses`	✅	❌	❌	❌
`WebSocket over HTTP/1`	✅	❌[^14]	❌[^14]	✅
`WebSocket over HTTP/2 and HTTP/3`	✅[^13]	❌	❌	❌
`Automatic Ping for HTTP/2+`	✅	N/A	❌	N/A
`Automatic Connection Upgrade / Downgrade`	✅	N/A	❌	N/A
`Server Side Event (SSE)`	✅	❌	❌	❌
`WASM / Pyodide`	✅	✅	❌	❌

📈 Look at the performance comparison against them!

Given the script hosted at https://gist.github.com/Ousret/9e99b07e66eec48ccea5811775ec116d that simply send 1000 requests. We deliberately use a real remote endpoint, disabled Niquests manual multiplexing (for fairness), to showcase how the client behave in a real life usage.

GET https://httpbingo.org/get

Client	Average Delay to Complete	Notes
httpx	2.087s	HTTP/2
aiohttp	1.351s	HTTP/1.1
niquests	0.551s	HTTP/2

:tada: Niquests can easily bring you twice the throughput if you migrated today. Join us today!

>>> import niquests
>>> r = niquests.get('https://one.one.one.one')
>>> r.status_code
200
>>> r.headers['content-type']
'application/json; charset=utf-8'
>>> r.oheaders.content_type.charset
'utf-8'
>>> r.encoding
'utf-8'
>>> r.text
'{"authenticated": true, ...'
>>> r.json()
{'authenticated': True, ...}
>>> r
<Response HTTP/2 [200]>
>>> r.ocsp_verified
True
>>> r.conn_info.established_latency
datetime.timedelta(microseconds=38)

or using async/await!

import niquests
import asyncio

async def main() -> None:
    r = await niquests.aget('https://one.one.one.one', stream=True)
    print(r)  # Output: <Response HTTP/2 [200]>
    payload = await r.text  # we await text because we set `stream=True`!
    print(payload)  # Output: <html>...
    # or... without stream=True
    r = await niquests.aget('https://one.one.one.one')
    print(r)  # Output: <Response HTTP/3 [200]>
    payload = r.text  # we don't need to away anything, it's already loaded!
    print(payload)  # Output: <html>...

asyncio.run(main())

Niquests allows you to send HTTP requests extremely easily. There’s no need to manually add query strings to your URLs, or to form-encode your PUT & POST data — just use the json method!

This project does not require any compilation toolchain. The HTTP/3 support is not enforced and installed if your platform can support it natively (e.g. pre-built wheel available).

✨ Installing Niquests and Supported Versions

Niquests is available on PyPI:

$ python -m pip install niquests

Niquests officially supports Python or PyPy 3.7+.

🚀 Supported Features & Best–Practices

Niquests is ready for the demands of building scalable, robust and reliable HTTP–speaking applications.

DNS over HTTPS, DNS over QUIC, DNS over TLS, and DNS over UDP
Automatic Content Decompression and Decoding
OS truststore by default, no more certifi!
OCSP Certificate Revocation Verification
Advanced connection timings inspection
In-memory certificates (CAs, and mTLS)
Browser-style TLS/SSL Verification
Certificate Revocation List (CRL)
Sessions with Cookie Persistence
Keep-Alive & Connection Pooling
International Domains and URLs
Automatic honoring of .netrc
Basic & Digest Authentication
Familiar dict–like Cookies
Network settings fine-tuning
HTTP/2 with prior knowledge
Object-oriented headers
Multi-part File Uploads
Post-Quantum Security
Chunked HTTP Requests
Fully type-annotated!
Run in the Browser!
SOCKS Proxy Support
Connection Timeouts
Streaming Downloads
HTTP/2 by default
HTTP/3 over QUIC
Early Responses
Happy Eyeballs
Multiplexed!
Thread-safe!
WebSocket!
Trailers!
DNSSEC!
Async!
SSE!
ECH!

Need something more? Create an issue, we actively listen.

📝 Why did we pursue this?

For many years now, Requests has been frozen. Being left in a vegetative state and not evolving, this blocked millions of developers from using more advanced features.

We don't have to reinvent the wheel all over again, HTTP client Requests is well established and really pleasant in its usage. We believe that Requests has the most inclusive and developer friendly interfaces. We intend to keep it that way. As long as we can, long live Niquests!

How about a nice refresher with a mere CTRL+H import requests to import niquests as requests ?

💼 For Enterprise

Professional support for Niquests is available as part of the Tidelift Subscription. Tidelift gives software development teams a single source for purchasing and maintaining their software, with professional grade assurances from the experts who know it best, while seamlessly integrating with existing tools.

You may also be interested in unlocking specific advantages (like access to a private issue tracker) by looking at our GitHub sponsor tiers.

Niquests is a highly improved HTTP client that is based (forked) on Requests. The previous project original author is Kenneth Reitz and actually left the maintenance of Requests years ago.

[^1]: aiohttp was conceived solely for an asynchronous context. [^2]: requests has no support for asynchronous request. [^3]: while the HTTP/2 connection object can handle concurrent requests, you cannot leverage its true potential. [^4]: loading client certificate without file can't be done. [^5]: httpx officially claim to be thread safe but recent tests demonstrate otherwise as of March 2026. https://github.com/jawah/niquests/issues/83#issuecomment-1956065258 https://github.com/encode/httpx/issues/3072 https://github.com/encode/httpx/issues/3002 and only recently acknowledged the issue in https://github.com/encode/httpx/issues/3324 (one year after getting valid reports). [^6]: they do not expose anything to control network aspects such as IPv4/IPv6 toggles, and timings (e.g. DNS response time, established delay, TLS handshake delay, etc...) and such. [^7]: while advertised as possible, they refuse to make it the default due to performance and stability issues. as of December 2025 an extra is required to enable it manually. [^8]: they don't support HTTP/3 at all. [^9]: you must use a custom DNS resolver so that it can preemptively connect using HTTP/3 over QUIC when remote is compatible. [^10]: performance measured when leveraging a multiplexed connection with or without uses of any form of concurrency as of March 2026. The research compared httpx, requests, aiohttp against niquests. See https://gist.github.com/Ousret/9e99b07e66eec48ccea5811775ec116d [^11]: enabled when using a custom DNS resolver. [^12]: depends on your Python runtime. ECH and PQ support through HTTP/3 over QUIC requires qh3 installed. HTTP/1, and HTTP/2 can benefit from PQ and ECH, provided the rtls extra is installed. ECH requires you to use a custom resolver (e.g. DNS-over-HTTPS). [^13]: most servers out there are not ready for this feature, but Niquests is already compliant and future-proof! Caddy server and HAProxy support this! [^14]: they don't offer any built-in to speak with a WebSocket server.