As tradition dictates, I have spent many hours walking through the responses to the curl user survey of the year. I have sorted tables, rendered updated graphs and tried to wrap my head around what all these numbers might mean and what conclusions and lessons we should draw.

I present the results, the collected answers, to the survey mostly raw without a lot of analysis or decisions. This, to allow everyone who takes the time to reads through to form their own opinion and thoughts. It also gives me more time to glance over the numbers many more times before I make up my mind about possible outcomes.

The 2024 user survey analysis document

If you find any mistakes or omissions in this document, let me know and I might fix and update corrected versions.

63 pages and 14,800 words. Enjoy!

Welcome to the 11th annual curl user survey. This is a once a year poll that we ask as many curl and libcurl users as possible to respond to.

>> Take the survey <<

This is in many ways the only real way we get to know what curl users think about all sorts of curl matters. Our website does not log, it has no adds, it uses no cookies and it does no tracking. We do not count downloads, we do not know which man pages are read the most. We mostly ship our code into the void without knowing a whole about what people do with and think about it.

Asking our users directly is in effect our only and best way to get proper answers. So we do this every year, and we ask a lot of questions in the same fashion as last year so that we can better detect trends and changes in the community.

Your help is not only appreciated, it is crucial. Tell us your honest opinion. And if you have friends you know use curl or libcurl, please ask them to submit a set of answers as well. You help us greatly by donating several minutes of your busy life.

>> Take the survey <<

The survey will be up during 14 days from May 14th until the end of May 28th 2024. It would be awesome to try to beat the last year’s submission numbers when 606 persons responded.

See also: the curl user survey 2023 analysis, which details the results and thoughts after last year’s edition.

The curl user survey 2023 ran for two full weeks in the end of May, in the same fashion we run it every year.

I have then collected all the answers, ran the numbers and looked at the trends and put all the conclusions and graphs into a single document for everyone to enjoy.

Five quick things

If you are in too much of a hurry to read it all, here are five key facts this year’s survey revealed:

1. curl users leave Twitter and join Mastodon in notable amounts
2. Windows 11 is growing quickly as a platform curl users are on
3. HTTP/3 is used by a quarter of all curl users
4. WebSocket reached the top-10 of most used protocols before its first birthday
5. The positive comments in section 21 are heart-warming

The document

The final document is a 3MB 36 page PDF with collected data and conclusions. You find it here:

curl-user-survey-2023-analysis

Enjoy!

Video presentation

I will do a dedicated live-streamed video presentation of this curl user survey 2023 analysis and talk about how I see the numbers, the trends and maybe also show some additional data that was left out from the final document.

Previous years

This is the 10th year we run the survey. Here are links to five previous analysis documents:

2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018

For widely used, widely distributed open source project such as curl, we often have little to no relation at all with our users and therefore it is hard to get feedback and learn what works and what is less good.

Our best and primary way is thus simply to ask users every year how they use curl.

user survey

For the tenth consecutive year, we put together a survey and we ask everyone we know and can reach who ever used curl or library within the last year, to donate a few minutes of their precious time and give us their honest opinions.

The survey is anonymous but hosted by Google. We do not care who you are, but we want to know how you think curl works for you.

The survey will remain online for submissions during 14 days. From Thursday May 25 2023 until midnight (CEST) Wednseday June 7 2023. Please tell your friends about it!

user survey

Post survey analysis

At June 5 the painstaking work of analyzing the results and putting together a summary and presentation begins. It usually takes me a few weeks to complete. Once that is done, the results will be shared for the entire world to enjoy.

Then we see what the curl project should take home and do as a direct result of what users say. Updating procedures, writing documentation and adding features to the roadmap are among the things that can happen and has happened after previous surveys.

user survey

Once again I’ve collected the numbers, generated graphs, scratched my head and tried to understand what users mean and how to best use this treasure trove of user feedback.

The curl user survey 2022 ran for two full weeks in the end of May. Here is the document with all the numbers, graphs and analysis from this year’s data.

You will learn what protocols curl users use (HTTPS and HTTP), which TLS backend is the most popular (OpenSSL) and which the top platform is (Linux). And a lot more.

Spoiler: the results are not terribly different than last year and the year before that!

The analysis is a 36-page PDF, available here:

curl-user-survey-2022-analysis

If you have specific feedback on the analysis itself, then I’m all ears. I’m not statistics scholar or anything, but I believe all the numbers, graphs and data I present in there are accurate barring my mistakes of course.

For the eighth consecutive year, we run the curl user survey. We usually kick it off during this time of the year.

Tell us how you use curl!

This is the best and frankly the only way the curl project has to get real feedback from people as to what features that are used and which are not used as well as other details in the project that can help us navigate our future and what to do next. And what not to do next.

curl runs no ads, has no trackers, users don’t report anything back and the project has no website logs. We are in many aspects completely blind as to what users do with curl and what they think of it. Unless we ask. This is us asking.

How is curl working for you?

[Go to survey]

Please ask your curl-using friends to also stop by and tell us their views!

[The survey analysis]

Credits

Image by Andreas Breitling from Pixabay

It is time to once again tell you that people responded very similarly to how they did last year…

curl user survey 2021 analysys

Not a lot changed this year compared to last year. Perhaps the biggest three changes this year were that

1. HTTP/3, Unix domain sockets and DNS-over-HTTPS increased significantly among “used features”

2. NSS and GnuTLS both had their usage shares among used TLS libraries fall significantly.

3. My twitter account and this blog are now top-voted as the two channels people follow mostly for participation in curl related topics.

The most used protocols are of course still HTTPS and HTTP, and the newest supported protocol (GOPHERS) checks in as the least used protocol this time around.

Much more details can be found in the linked PDF. Enjoy.

For the eighth consecutive year we run the annual curl user survey again in 2021. The form just went up and I would love to have you spend 10 minutes of your busy life to tell us how you think curl works, what doesn’t work and what we should do next.

We have no tracking on the website and we have no metrics or usage measurements of the curl tool or the libcurl library. The only proper way we have left to learn how users and people in general think of us and how curl works, is to ask. So this is what we do, and we limit the asking to once per year.

You can also view this from your own “selfish” angle: this is a way for you to submit your input, your opinions and we will listen.

The survey will be up two weeks during which I hope to get as many people as possible to respond. If you have friends you know use curl or libcurl, please have them help us out too!

Take the survey

Yes really, please take the survey!

Bonus: see the extensive analysis of the 2020 user survey. There’s a lot of user feedback to learn from it.

In 2020, the curl user survey ran for the 7th consecutive year. It ended on May 31 and this year we manage to get feedback donated by 930 individuals.

Analysis

Analyzing this huge lump of data, comments and shared experiences is a lot of work and I’m sorry it’s taken me several weeks to complete it. I’m happy to share this 47 page PDF document here with you:

curl user survey 2020 analysis

If you have questions on the content or find mistakes or things looking odd in the data or graphs, do let me know!

If you want to help out to do a better survey or analysis next year, I hope you know that you’d be much appreciated…

The annual curl user survey is up. If you ever used curl or libcurl during the last year, please consider donating ten minutes of your time and fill in the question on the link below!

[no longer open]

The survey will be up for 14 days. Please share this with your curl-using friends as well and ask them to contribute. This is our only and primary way to find out what users actually do with curl and what you want with it – and don’t want it to do!

The survey is hosted by Google forms. The curl project will not track users and we will not ask who you are (and than some general details to get a picture of curl users in general).

The analysis from the 2019 survey is available.