Charles
by Charles · HTTP proxy and monitor for viewing HTTP and HTTPS traffic
BenchRank score
Screenshots of Charles
Homepage
Overview
Charles is an HTTP proxy, HTTP monitor and reverse proxy that lets a developer view all HTTP and SSL/HTTPS traffic between their machine and the internet, including requests, responses, headers and cookies. It records traffic, simulates slower connections and shows download statistics. It is distributed as a download, with a free trial of version 5.2.
- Best for
- Developers who need to inspect HTTP and HTTPS traffic between their machine and the internet
- Pricing
- No prices appear in the captured text; the site links to a Buy page and offers a free trial download.
- Runs on
- iOS
Strengths and trade-offs
Strengths
- Records all HTTP and HTTPS traffic, with headers and cookies
- Reveals request, response, cookie and caching contents
- Simulates slower internet connections
- Free trial download of the current version
Trade-offs
- No prices published on the captured pages, though there is a Buy page
- Download is a free trial, so continued use implies a purchase
- Runs as a downloaded desktop application on your own machine
- Linked third-party reviews cover Flash and early iPhone work, so are dated
How Charles markets itself
A structured read of the promise, proof and page design on Charles’s captured homepage.
Homepage capture
“Charles”
- Angle: Developer-first
- Hero: Product screenshot
Pricing
Published plans and prices from Charles’s own pricing page.
How this score is made up
Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.
MCP support
Whether an agent can drive the product through the Model Context Protocol, and how much setup that takes.
Documentation
Publicly reachable docs — coverage, freshness, code samples and machine readability.
Agent friendliness
How readable the site is to an automated client: llms.txt, structured data, server-rendered content, crawler access.
Changelog
A public, dated record of what shipped and when — the clearest signal that a product is still alive.
Marketing site structure
Whether the site answers a buyer's questions: clear positioning, the pages that matter, and accessibility.
Page speed
How fast the site loads for real visitors: Chrome UX Report 75th-percentile LCP, INP and CLS, with a Lighthouse mobile run standing in where a site has too little traffic for field data.
Operational trust
Status page and incident history, security disclosure, compliance and data-processing documentation.
Measured, but not part of the score
Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.
Openness
Source availability, self-hosting, data export and open standards. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — paid SaaS is not worse for being paid SaaS.
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Where this comes from
The Charles pages BenchRank reads when it scores the product — its documentation, release notes, status and security pages, and its repository where there is one.
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Is this your product?
Claim Charles to manage its profile. Claiming lets you suggest edits to the descriptive fields — it never changes scores or rankings.