A Charles Proxy alternative
If Charles is starting to feel like the wrong shape — a proxy per laptop, a certificate per device, a session per person — here is what changes when the feed is shared.
Teams outgrow Charles for predictable reasons: every tester configures a proxy and installs a certificate by hand, sessions live on whoever captured them, and nothing sees the traffic from a rack of test phones at once. Busymate DevTools installs as an app on the phone, needs no Wi-Fi proxy setting, and puts every device — including a farm of them — into one feed with roles and an audit trail.
Try one workflow before switching
- Keep your existing capture files. Pair one test device with Busymate and capture a request you already understand.
- Recreate one mock or breakpoint and check the result. Existing proxy settings and rules are not automatically transferred.
- Confirm that cloud storage, the retention window, and device access grants suit your team before moving a larger workflow.
Built for the phone,
Compare the complete workflow: where capture runs, how you share access, and how you automate debugging.
Capture from iPhone, Android, Chrome, the proxy, and your phone farm in one place. Teammates see requests from devices they own or have been granted access to.
459 MCP tools let your agent inspect captured traffic and act within your role. Destructive actions require confirmation.
A rack of real Android and iOS devices you mirror, tap and script from the browser — or from a sentence typed to the agent.
Permissions are enforced in the database, actions are recorded in an audit trail, and the dashboard and API cannot reveal stored vault secrets.
The same questions,
Our column lists only what has shipped. Their column rests on what we read on their own public pages — anything we could not confirm is marked, not guessed.
- Included
- Partly
- Not included
- Not verified
Facts about Charles Proxy were read on its public product, pricing and documentation pages on 2026-09-01. If something has changed, tell us and we will correct the page. Report a correction
When Charles Proxy is the right pick
Plenty of teams should keep using Charles Proxy. These are the cases where we would tell you to.
You want the deepest desktop toolbox
Map Local, Map Remote, Rewrite, Mirror, DNS spoofing, throttling — Charles has a tool for nearly every reshaping job, refined over many years.
You need a one-off perpetual licence
Fifty dollars once, on one computer, with a 30-day trial first — predictable and offline-friendly.
Everything must stay on your machine
Charles keeps sessions local. When a hosted feed is off the table, a local desktop proxy is the honest answer.
Questions people ask
Do I still need to set a Wi-Fi proxy on every phone?
No. The iOS and Android apps capture through an on-device VPN tunnel, so there is no manual proxy setting and no laptop that has to be on the same network. The desktop proxy is still there for browsers and backends.
Can I keep working the Charles way for a while?
Yes. Charles and the Busymate proxy are both standard HTTP proxies; run either on the laptop while the phones move to the apps. Nothing on the phone depends on the desktop tool you keep.
Where do Map Local and Rewrite go?
Mocks stand in for Map Local, block rules for the Block List, breakpoints plus resend for Edit and Repeat, and scripts for Rewrite. They apply from the server to every source, so a rule set once shapes the traffic of the whole team.
Is this a fit for one developer, not a team?
It works solo — the free tier exists for exactly that — but the reasons to leave Charles are mostly team reasons. A single developer happy in a desktop app has little to gain from switching.
See your own traffic
Follow the setup guide for your capture source, then open a request in the dashboard. HTTPS decryption requires certificate trust and a supported client.