In short I think CGI.pm is slow bloated and unintuitive. The bloat comes from trying to support two hundred different options from generating html to parsing uris to header types and stuff ot that nature. It's slow, well, it just is! Look for benchmarks vs cgi::lite/simple. As for unintuitive, this is purely subjective of course, but I vastly prefer the cgi::lite approach where I have one method, parse_form_data, which takes a 'form data type' field and returns a nice simple hash. I can then use this hash however I want. It's simple.