Hi, one of the maintainer of Hurl [1]. It is effectively basically just curl (we're using libcurl under the hood). I would say that we have added the ability to chain request (you could use curl in a shell script), and a bunch of assert (like jsonpath, xpath etc...) on response (which you could arguably do also with shell script).

We also wanted something text based, that could easily be integrated in a CI [2] for instance. We are using Hurl to test our web application (~2M unique visitors/month). Very happy with it currently, but there are really a lot of very good tools in this space (as we can see in these comments).

[1] https://hurl.dev

[2] https://hurl.dev/docs/tutorial/ci-cd-integration.html