# Free Alternative to Charles Published January 1, 2026 · Updated August 10, 2026 The best free alternative to Charles ($50) is Proxyman. Install it with: `brew install --cask proxyman`. ## Ditching Charles Proxy: The Best Free Network Debuggers for Mac I bought my first Charles Proxy license in 2013. For years, the vase-shaped icon lived permanently in my macOS dock. If you were building iOS apps or debugging APIs, you used Charles. The $50 price tag felt completely reasonable for a tool that let you peek into the black box of network traffic. Things change. Charles is built on Java. Running it on a modern M-series MacBook feels like booting up a time machine to 2005. The interface is cluttered. Memory usage spikes randomly. When I load a session with heavy image assets, the entire app stutters. Charles 5 (March 2025) still ships as a Java application; licenses remain USD $50 for the 5.X line. Users have begged for a native macOS rewrite for years, but the core experience still feels dated next to Swift-native Proxyman builds. Developers are tired of fighting an ancient UI just to map a local JSON file to a production endpoint. I spent recent weeks re-testing every HTTP monitor I could install on my M3 MacBook Pro, including Proxyman 6.14.0 and mitmproxy 12.2.3 from Homebrew. I wanted to see if the free and open-source community had finally caught up to the old standard. The short answer is yes. The long answer is that you have to choose your replacement carefully based on your exact workflow. Some tools focus entirely on native macOS performance. Others lean heavily into scriptability for automation. A few try to combine API testing with network interception. In this guide, I break down exactly what it is like to use these modern alternatives. I cover their memory footprints, their quirks, and where their free tiers start to nag you for money. If you are tired of Java eating your RAM, you will find a better tool below. ## Free alternatives 1. [Proxyman](https://bundl.run/apps/proxyman) — HTTP debugging proxy `brew install --cask proxyman` ## Verdict Charles Proxy had a great run. It defined network debugging for a decade. But sticking with Java-based apps on Apple Silicon hardware is a compromised experience. In my testing, I realized how much time I used to waste fighting the Charles UI. Switching to native tools like Proxyman or terminal-first tools like mitmproxy removes that friction. You spend less time configuring certificates and more time actually debugging your code. Export your HAR files, delete your old Charles certificates, and move on. ## FAQ ### How do I intercept iOS traffic without Charles? You need to install a proxy app on your Mac, find your Mac's local IP address, and manually enter it into your iPhone's Wi-Fi settings. Open Proxyman or mitmproxy to start listening. Then, open Safari on your iPhone and download the proxy's root certificate. Go to iOS Settings, install the profile, and then navigate to 'Certificate Trust Settings' to enable full trust. Proxyman automates this entirely if you are using the Xcode simulator, saving you about ten minutes of tapping. ### Is Proxyman actually free to use? Proxyman operates on a freemium model. The free version does not have a time limit. You can use it forever to monitor basic network traffic. However, they restrict the developer tools. You can only pin two domains at a time. You can only create two active Map Local rules. If your workflow requires mocking dozens of endpoints simultaneously, you will hit a paywall. For simple observation and occasional payload editing, the free tier is perfectly adequate. ### Why does my Mac say 'Your connection is not private' when using a proxy? HTTP proxies work by performing a Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack on your own traffic. The proxy intercepts the request, decrypts it, and re-encrypts it using its own certificate. Your browser notices that the certificate does not match the actual website (like Google or GitHub). To fix this, you must install the proxy tool's root certificate into your macOS Keychain Access app and mark it as 'Always Trust'. Every tool listed here provides a one-click button to do this during setup. ### Can I import old Charles sessions into Proxyman or Reqable? No. Charles uses a proprietary file format called `.chls`. Other applications cannot read this format directly. If you want to migrate your old data, you must open your `.chls` files in Charles one last time and export them as HAR (HTTP Archive) files. HAR is an industry-standard JSON format. Proxyman, Reqable, and HTTP Toolkit all import HAR files perfectly. ### How do I view gRPC traffic on a Mac? Charles Proxy is notoriously bad at handling gRPC. To view gRPC traffic properly, you should switch to Proxyman or HTTP Toolkit. Proxyman natively decodes gRPC messages if you provide the Protobuf definition files. It formats the binary data back into readable JSON. You just drag your `.proto` files into the Proxyman settings window, and it automatically applies the schema to matching incoming traffic. ### Why is my proxy dropping WebSocket connections? WebSockets start as a standard HTTP request and then upgrade to a persistent TCP connection. Older proxy tools often mishandle this upgrade header. If your WebSockets are dropping immediately upon connection, check your proxy's SSL interception rules. Sometimes bypassing SSL interception for the specific WebSocket domain solves the issue. mitmproxy and Proxyman both have dedicated WebSocket viewers that handle the protocol upgrade correctly without dropping the connection. ### Does mitmproxy work natively on Apple Silicon? Yes. mitmproxy is written in Python. When you install it via Homebrew on an M1/M2/M3/M4 Mac, Homebrew pulls the native ARM64 Python binaries. It runs natively and is incredibly fast. You will not see the Rosetta translation process running in Activity Monitor. This is a major reason why it uses significantly less battery power than Java-based apps like Charles. ### How do I bypass SSL pinning on Android? SSL pinning is a security measure where an Android app refuses to trust user-installed certificates. Normal proxies will fail to intercept this traffic. You have two options. First, use HTTP Toolkit with a rooted Android device or an emulator; it uses ADB to inject the certificate directly into the system store. Second, if you have the source code, you can temporarily add a network security configuration file to your Android project that explicitly trusts user certificates for debug builds. ### Can I use these developer tools to block ads system-wide? You technically can, but you shouldn't. Using a debugging proxy like Proxyman or mitmproxy to block ads requires routing all your Mac's traffic through the interception engine at all times. This drains battery, slows down your network, and breaks apps that use strict certificate pinning. If you want to block ads system-wide on a Mac, use a DNS sinkhole like Pi-hole or a native app like AdGuard. Keep debugging proxies for development work. ### Is Java required for any of these modern proxy apps? No. That is the main reason developers are switching. Proxyman uses Swift. Reqable and ProxyPin use Flutter (Dart). mitmproxy uses Python. HTTP Toolkit uses Electron (Node/Chromium). Caido uses Rust. You can safely uninstall the Java Runtime Environment from your Mac if Charles was the only app relying on it. ## Sources - [Buy Charles Licenses — official pricing](https://www.charlesproxy.com/buy/) - [Charles Proxy version history](https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/version-history/) - [Proxyman documentation](https://docs.proxyman.io/) - [Proxyman official site](https://proxyman.com/) - [mitmproxy GitHub repository](https://github.com/mitmproxy/mitmproxy) - [mitmproxy.org](https://mitmproxy.org/) - [HTTP Toolkit](https://httptoolkit.com/) - [Reqable official site](https://reqable.com/) - [ProxyPin GitHub repository](https://github.com/wanghongenpin/network_proxy_flutter) - [Wireshark](https://www.wireshark.org/) ## Related - [Proxyman vs mitmproxy](https://bundl.run/compare/proxyman-vs-mitmproxy) ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "Organization", "@id": "https://bundl.run/#organization", "name": "Bundl.run", "url": "https://bundl.run", "logo": { "@type": "ImageObject", "url": "https://bundl.run/og-image.png", "width": 1200, "height": 630 }, "description": "The Ninite for Mac. 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