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).
