Evans vs grpcmd

Evans is a free universal gRPC client for manual API inspection and scripting on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Its interactive REPL completes package, service, and RPC names. Stateless CLI mode reads standard input or files and prints JSON-formatted results. When server reflection is enabled, Evans can use that instead of proto files. It supports client-streaming, server-streaming, and bidirectional-streaming RPCs, plus gRPC-Web; TLS is not supported for gRPC-Web. The listed IDL and codec is Protocol Buffers 3, and the compressor is GZIP. For ordinary gRPC connections, the project documents secure TLS connections with the --tls option. Installation options include GitHub Releases, Homebrew, Docker, and Go, with Releases or Homebrew recommended for automatic updates. The documented Go installation requires Go v1.20 or later. The repeat option does not support client-streaming or bidirectional-streaming RPCs. Evans uses the MIT license.

grpcmd is a free command-line tool for working with gRPC services on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It can use reflection to find available services and methods, describe a method’s request and response messages, and make calls. Requests and responses can stream, with headers, data, and trailers included in output. Users who do not want to rely on reflection can instead provide.proto files and import search paths. The tool can also start a gRPC server implementing grpcmd.GrpcmdService with reflection, and its documentation covers shell completion for Bash, Zsh, fish, and PowerShell. A related tool, grpcmd-script, lets users define endpoint tests in JavaScript and assert response headers, data messages, and trailers; it is distributed as a binary and does not require Node.js. The separate grpcmd-gui desktop app supports reflection-based method lookup, request headers, response headers and trailers, JSON request templates, streaming, and themes. GUI downloads are available for macOS, Windows, and Linux, including amd64 and arm64 builds. grpcmd is listed at free; grpcmd-script is listed at $9 a year with early-bird pricing.