2 entries in this register are declared substitutes for, successors to or predecessors of curl-impersonate (lexiforest), and 1 of them is still shipping at the last field check. curl-impersonate (lexiforest) itself reads ACTIVE, and 1 of the candidates carry a state mark other than ACTIVE or SEMI, which is the part a list without check dates cannot tell you. Every row is judged by the same rubric, from the same sweep, on the same fields.
Every row below is judged by the same rule as curl-impersonate (lexiforest) itself, from the
same field check. Supersession is only printed where a project or its
author says so — this register does not infer that one tool replaces
another because it is newer.
Read the state column with the licence column. A permissively licensed
project that stopped shipping is not safer than a copyleft one that did
not.
What curl-impersonate (lexiforest) does, so you know what you are replacing
Builds curl against the TLS libraries and with the settings real browsers use, so a command-line request produces a handshake and an HTTP/2 profile that match a browser rather than a tool.
A substitute has to do that job, not merely occupy the same category. It impersonates specific browser versions, and a version that no longer exists in the wild is its own kind of signal. Check which targets the current build supports and how recently that list was refreshed.
How this register decides what counts as an alternative
curl-impersonate (lexiforest) is recorded as the successor to curl-impersonate (lwthiker). Both directions of that edge are stored once and reversed when the index is built, so the graph cannot contradict itself in one direction and agree in the other.
curl_cffi is recorded as a substitute for the same job. The alternative relation is symmetric and carries no ordering at all: it says these things answer the same question, and it says nothing whatsoever about which answers it better.
Nothing on this page is a ranking, a score or a recommendation, and nothing on it is a detection-test result — no entry in this register has been run against any anti-bot system by this register. What the table gives you is four measured columns and one derived one, applied identically to every row.
How to read the comparison above
1 of the 2 candidates read ACTIVE or SEMI and 1 do not. Start by reading the state column, then read the last-push and latest-release columns against each other, because they answer different questions: a push says somebody is there, and a tag says there is something you can pin a dependency to.
Every entry in the table declares a licence, which is less common in this catalogue than it should be — the entries that declare none are grouped separately. Read the licence column beside the state column rather than after it: a permissively licensed project that stopped shipping is not a safer dependency than a copyleft one that did not.
Why NRND: pushed_at = 2024-07-18 — 757 days, inside the 365–1095 day NRND band.
Field
Value at this printing
pushed_at
2024-07-18
archived
false
latest_release
—
license.spdx_id
MIT
stargazers_count
6800
http_status
200
fetched_at
2026-08-14T09:12:00Z
rubric_edition
2nd, in force
Endpoint: GET https://api.github.com/repos/lwthiker/curl-impersonate
unauthenticated · 60 req/hr
A live read does not change what is printed above it. The site records that you ran it; what GitHub returned is not kept. The printed state moves only when the register is swept and a new printing is issued. raw JSON
The most common single mistake in this whole field: installing the repository with the most stars. Check the push date first — that is all this catalogue is for. — ED.
Why ACTIVE: pushed_at = 2026-08-08 — 6 days, within the 90-day ACTIVE threshold.
Field
Value at this printing
pushed_at
2026-08-08
archived
false
latest_release
—
license.spdx_id
MIT
stargazers_count
6300
http_status
200
fetched_at
2026-08-14T09:12:00Z
rubric_edition
2nd, in force
Endpoint: GET https://api.github.com/repos/lexiforest/curl_cffi
unauthenticated · 60 req/hr
A live read does not change what is printed above it. The site records that you ran it; what GitHub returned is not kept. The printed state moves only when the register is swept and a new printing is issued. raw JSON
Questions about replacing curl-impersonate (lexiforest)
Answered from the same fields the table above prints, and from no other source.
What is the best alternative to curl-impersonate (lexiforest)?
This register does not answer that, because it publishes no ranking and has tested no tool to rank. What it can tell you is which candidates are still shipping: curl_cffi. The rest of the decision is fit, licence and how much of your own stack you are prepared to change.
Are these curl-impersonate (lexiforest) alternatives still maintained?
curl_cffi reads ACTIVE. Each of those states is derived from that entry's own measured fields by the rubric in force, at the field check printed in the folio, and the clause that produced it is printed on the entry page.
Why does this list not rank the alternatives?
Because a ranking would be an opinion wearing a number's clothes. Every figure on this site is a date, a count, an SPDX identifier or an HTTP status you can re-fetch from the endpoint named beside it, and there is no honest way to compress those into an ordering without inventing weights nobody published. The rubric sets states; it does not rate them against each other.
Where does the alternatives data for curl-impersonate (lexiforest) come from?
From declared edges in the register itself, never inferred. Each edge is stored once and reversed at build time, and every field in the table is read from the same sweep that produced the rest of the catalogue. The whole set is downloadable as CC0 JSON and CSV, including the supersedes, superseded_by and alternative_to columns.
Section 07 is the half of a fingerprint that JavaScript cannot reach, and a browser-shaped page surface over a tool-shaped handshake is a contradiction that no amount of navigator patching fixes. Donut Browser is a real browser rather than an impersonating client, which resolves that layer by not having the problem — and it adds profile-level proxy handling with a launch gate that checks the exit's geography against the profile before anything starts.