The primary difference is in the underlying philosophy. I encourage everyone to read the manifest from the main project site [0]. Most of the points are counteracting bad design decisions (IMO) made in the official client.<p>In general, official client tries to do too many things at once. In the result, the code base is huge -- too big to be easily audited; it&#x27;s also proven that it&#x27;s likely to have a lot more bugs. On a similar note, letsencrypt-auto, the default installation method, pulls in Apache plugin with all of its dependencies. And so on, and so forth...<p>At the same time standard modes of operation are well hidden and&#x2F;or difficult to configure. For instance, running the official client without root is technically possible, but let me know how much time it took you to figure this out ;). Likewise, scripting is pretty much impossible, because the CLI tends to ask interactive questions... &quot;webroot&quot; plugin is probably the only plugin that could be made into non-interactive mode, and again you have to be knowledgeable enough to figure out all necessary flags.<p>simp_le tries to takes the best from the official client (&quot;webroot&quot; plugin -- not stealing, I authored that plugin myself) and adds some missing features that IMO should be the standard. E.g. you can just just put `simp_le --some --flags &amp;&amp; this_command_will_be_run_only_if_cert_was_renewed_eg_restart_nginx` into your crontab -- this mode of operation is simply not possible with the official client.<p>NB You can also turn simp_le into a standalone binary (~8MB) using built-in PyInstaller setup [1] and distribute to your machines without having to install any dependencies (even Python) :)<p>I hope that answers your question. You can also catch me on #letsencrypt, or better yet #simp_le (both at Freenode).<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kuba&#x2F;simp_le#manifest" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kuba&#x2F;simp_le#manifest</a>
[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kuba&#x2F;simp_le&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;pyi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kuba&#x2F;simp_le&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;pyi</a>