Introducing Speedtest® CLI (2024)

At Ookla’s core, we are a team of passionate technology enthusiasts who constantly push to improve the speed of the internet across the globe. For thirteen years, Speedtest.net has provided the leading tools for people around the world to measure the speed and latency of their internet connections. From our Adobe Flash roots to our modern HTML5 and native applications, we have constantly focused on providing a high fidelity and rich experience for all internet users.

We have seen and have connected with many others who have the same goal — teams who have built brilliant ideas that leverage internet performance metrics to drive speed and reliability advancements across global networks.

Ookla’s goal is to support these teams by providing the best benchmarking toolsets to drive internet performance improvements across the world. Speedtest CLI is the next step in providing developers and engineers low level access to programmatically measure internet performance.

You can now run a Speedtest from your command line

We are proud to introduce our latest (and most visually minimal) application, Speedtest CLI. Speedtest CLI is a major departure from our existing applications — it is entirely text driven and does not have a traditional user interface. However, this minimalist interface is incredibly powerful — it provides the core of our Speedtest engines to software developers across the world.

This release marks the ability for any non-commercial individual to leverage over a decade of optimization and experience of network benchmarking within their own applications. Not only does Speedtest CLI provide best in class measurement techniques, but it also leverages our highly optimized C++ engine, custom Layer 7 protocols and the largest internet performance server network in the world to squeeze every bit per second out of a connection — even on embedded hardware. This is the same engine that powers our other native applications, and it is much more performant than existing solutions that rely on HTTP/S and traditional file transfer libraries.

For commercial entities, we offer Speedtest Powered^TM. Speedtest Powered further improves upon Speedtest CLI by providing deep network level customization, additional architectures, custom toolchain builds and enterprise support.

How you can use Speedtest CLI

We provide a number of different methods of working and communicating with Speedtest CLI. There is a basic user interface which provides the current stage and progress of the test for interactive use. However, the real power lies in the other output formats. We provide output in character delimited formats (CSV/TSV) and JSONL with a high sample rate — these can be consumed via the standard input of other applications to create live time progress meters and dynamic user interfaces.

Speedtest CLI can run on any platform

Speedtest is renowned for the ability to run on any platform, and Speedtest CLI is no exception. At launch, we will support Windows, MacOS, Linux and FreeBSD operating systems with statically compiled binaries. We are also excited to see what people will build within the IoT space on embedded devices — as a result, not only will we support the traditional i386 and AMD64 architectures, but we will also provide optimized builds for the ARM32 and ARM64 architectures on Linux.

Use cases for Speedtest CLI

One example of how Speedtest CLI can be used is a historical network monitoring tool. In a previous post, How I Maximized The Speed Of My Non-gigabit Internet Connection, Brennen Smith showcased an open source application which has tracked the historical performance of his internet connection with an internal build of Speedtest CLI. Now that this tool has been running for over a year, we can see that there have been multiple improvements on the ISP’s network. We can see that his upstream provider improved latency on November 2nd, and that there were multiple improvements on upload bandwidth since November 2018. Despite these improvements, one can also observe that there was degradation of the network from March 7th – 9th.

These are critical key performance indicators to track; with Speedtest CLI, anyone can build world-class applications to monitor and track network performance around the globe.

Tell us what you’re building with Speedtest CLI

The team at Ookla is incredibly excited to see what the community builds around Speedtest CLI. Please share your achievements and any tools you build with Speedtest CLI by tagging us on GitHub, Facebook or Twitter. We’re looking forward to seeing how you drive innovation and improvements to create a better internet for everyone across the world.

For more information about Speedtest CLI and documentation, please visit the Speedtest CLI page.

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