Here are just a few quick comments re Beast: 1. It's a terrible name, but I believe others have already mentioned that. 2. I don't believe there is any integration with platform proxy settings. I'll explain: I have my own basic HTTP client and server code that I've used in a handful of projects. There are a few features that it lacks that have caused me problems. In particular, when I tried to use my HTTP client code in an iOS app, it worked on WiFi networks but not on some cellular networks. After much remote debugging I realised that some cellular carriers in some countries require that HTTP traffic goes via a (non-transparent) proxy. If you use the iOS http client then this is handled for you, but my code knows nothing about it. For me to test a fix for this I would have had to fly to another continent.... This is the sort of thing that is particularly valuable in a Boost library: I try to write portable code, but I don't know the details of every platform that it will run on or even have test systems available to me. Having a library that knows about the platform-specific details, and which has been tested on a wide variety of those platforms, is very valuable. (And a library that instead just does the "easy parts" is something that I could have written, or already have written, myself.) 3. Finally a comment about the SSL example at https://github.com/vinniefalco/Beast/blob/master/example/http-client-ssl/htt... This says stream.set_verify_mode(ssl::verify_none); Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that means that it does not do any sort of certificate verification. As a matter of principle, I think that the *first* SSL example should show how to establish a properly-secure connection. See for example http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_ccs12.pdf (""The Most Dangerous Code in the World: Validating SSL Certificates in Non-Browser Software") and e.g. https://lwn.net/Articles/522111/ for discussion. A quick look at http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_47_0/doc/html/boost_asio/overview/ssl.html suggests that this might add as few as two more lines to the code. Regards, Phil.