Alternatives to NGINX logo

Alternatives to NGINX

HAProxy, lighttpd, Traefik, Caddy, and Envoy are the most popular alternatives and competitors to NGINX.
113.4K
61K
+ 1
5.5K

What is NGINX and what are its top alternatives?

NGINX is a powerful and widely-used web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTP cache. It is known for its high performance, stability, and scalability, making it a popular choice for handling high traffic websites. However, NGINX can be challenging to configure for beginners and lacks some advanced features compared to other alternatives.

  1. Apache HTTP Server: Apache is one of the oldest and most popular web servers available. It is highly customizable and feature-rich, with a wide range of modules available. However, Apache can be resource-intensive and may not perform as well as NGINX under high loads.
  2. Caddy: Caddy is a modern web server with automatic HTTPS support, easy configuration using Caddyfile, and a plugin system for extending functionality. It is known for its simplicity and ease of use, but may not offer as much flexibility as NGINX.
  3. LiteSpeed Web Server: LiteSpeed is a commercial web server known for its high performance and low resource usage. It offers features like LiteMage cache for speeding up websites, but may come with a price tag that is not present in the open-source NGINX.
  4. OpenLiteSpeed: OpenLiteSpeed is the open-source version of LiteSpeed Web Server, providing a free alternative with many of the same high-performance features. However, it may not have as extensive support or documentation as NGINX.
  5. Caddy: Caddy is a modern web server with automatic HTTPS support, easy configuration using Caddyfile, and a plugin system for extending functionality. It is known for its simplicity and ease of use, but may not offer as much flexibility as NGINX.
  6. HAProxy: HAProxy is a highly reliable and fast TCP/HTTP load balancer known for its high availability and scalability. It is commonly used in high traffic environments, but may require more complex configuration compared to NGINX.
  7. Traefik: Traefik is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer designed for microservices architectures. It offers automatic configuration, support for Docker and Kubernetes, and features like Let's Encrypt integration. However, it may not have as much community support as NGINX.
  8. Envoy Proxy: Envoy is a modern, high-performance edge and service proxy designed for cloud-native applications. It offers features like dynamic service discovery, load balancing, and advanced traffic management. However, its complexity and learning curve may be higher compared to NGINX.
  9. Istio: Istio is a service mesh that provides a unified control plane for managing microservices communication. It offers features like traffic management, security, and observability, but may be overkill for simpler use cases compared to NGINX.
  10. Varnish: Varnish is a powerful HTTP accelerator known for its caching capabilities and performance optimization. It is often used in front of web servers like NGINX to improve response times for dynamic content. However, Varnish may require more expertise to configure and maintain compared to NGINX.

Top Alternatives to NGINX

  • HAProxy
    HAProxy

    HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. ...

  • lighttpd
    lighttpd

    lighttpd has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that suffers load problems. ...

  • Traefik
    Traefik

    A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically. ...

  • Caddy
    Caddy

    Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go. ...

  • Envoy
    Envoy

    Originally built at Lyft, Envoy is a high performance C++ distributed proxy designed for single services and applications, as well as a communication bus and “universal data plane” designed for large microservice “service mesh” architectures. ...

  • Microsoft IIS
    Microsoft IIS

    Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks. ...

  • Varnish
    Varnish

    Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architecture. ...

  • Apache Tomcat
    Apache Tomcat

    Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations. ...

NGINX alternatives & related posts

HAProxy logo

HAProxy

2.4K
562
The Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer
2.4K
562
PROS OF HAPROXY
  • 132
    Load balancer
  • 102
    High performance
  • 69
    Very fast
  • 58
    Proxying for tcp and http
  • 55
    SSL termination
  • 31
    Open source
  • 27
    Reliable
  • 20
    Free
  • 18
    Well-Documented
  • 12
    Very popular
  • 7
    Runs health checks on backends
  • 7
    Suited for very high traffic web sites
  • 6
    Scalable
  • 5
    Ready to Docker
  • 4
    Powers many world's most visited sites
  • 3
    Simple
  • 2
    Ssl offloading
  • 2
    Work with NTLM
  • 1
    Available as a plugin for OPNsense
  • 1
    Redis
CONS OF HAPROXY
  • 6
    Becomes your single point of failure

related HAProxy posts

Around the time of their Series A, Pinterest’s stack included Python and Django, with Tornado and Node.js as web servers. Memcached / Membase and Redis handled caching, with RabbitMQ handling queueing. Nginx, HAproxy and Varnish managed static-delivery and load-balancing, with persistent data storage handled by MySQL.

See more
Tom Klein

We're using Git through GitHub for public repositories and GitLab for our private repositories due to its easy to use features. Docker and Kubernetes are a must have for our highly scalable infrastructure complimented by HAProxy with Varnish in front of it. We are using a lot of npm and Visual Studio Code in our development sessions.

See more
lighttpd logo

lighttpd

148
27
A secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web-server that has been optimized for high-performance environments
148
27
PROS OF LIGHTTPD
  • 7
    Lightweight
  • 6
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Virtal hosting
  • 2
    Simplicity
  • 2
    Full featured
  • 2
    Proxy
  • 2
    Open source
  • 1
    Available modules
  • 1
    Fast
  • 1
    Security
  • 1
    Ssl support
CONS OF LIGHTTPD
    Be the first to leave a con

    related lighttpd posts

    Traefik logo

    Traefik

    850
    93
    The Cloud Native Edge Router
    850
    93
    PROS OF TRAEFIK
    • 20
      Kubernetes integration
    • 18
      Watch service discovery updates
    • 14
      Letsencrypt support
    • 13
      Swarm integration
    • 12
      Several backends
    • 6
      Ready-to-use dashboard
    • 4
      Easy setup
    • 4
      Rancher integration
    • 1
      Mesos integration
    • 1
      Mantl integration
    CONS OF TRAEFIK
    • 7
      Complicated setup
    • 7
      Not very performant (fast)

    related Traefik posts

    Gabriel Pa
    Shared insights
    on
    TraefikTraefikNGINXNGINX
    at

    We switched to Traefik so we can use the REST API to dynamically configure subdomains and have the ability to redirect between multiple servers.

    We still use nginx with a docker-compose to expose the traffic from our APIs and TCP microservices, but for managing routing to the internet Traefik does a much better job

    The biggest win for naologic was the ability to set dynamic configurations without having to restart the server

    See more
    Shared insights
    on
    EnvoyEnvoyHAProxyHAProxyTraefikTraefikNGINXNGINX

    We are looking to configure a load balancer with some admin UI. We are currently struggling to decide between NGINX, Traefik, HAProxy, and Envoy. We will use a load balancer in a containerized environment and the load balancer should flexible and easy to reload without changes in case containers are scaled up.

    See more
    Caddy logo

    Caddy

    339
    20
    The Ultimate Server with Automatic HTTPS
    339
    20
    PROS OF CADDY
    • 6
      Easy HTTP/2 Server Push
    • 6
      Sane config file syntax
    • 4
      Builtin HTTPS
    • 2
      Letsencrypt support
    • 2
      Runtime config API
    CONS OF CADDY
    • 3
      New kid

    related Caddy posts

    Scott Mebberson
    CTO / Chief Architect at Idearium · | 5 upvotes · 587.5K views
    Shared insights
    on
    NGINXNGINXCaddyCaddy

    We used to primarily use nginx for our static web server and proxy in-front of Node.js. Now, we use Caddy. And we couldn't be happier.

    Caddy is simpler on all fronts. Configuration is easier. Free HTTPS out of the box. Some fantastic plugins. And for the most part, it's fast.

    Don't get me wrong, it's not lost on me that Nginx is actually a superior product.

    But for the times when you don't need that extra performance, and complexity - take a look at Caddy.

    See more
    Envoy logo

    Envoy

    296
    9
    C++ front/service proxy
    296
    9
    PROS OF ENVOY
    • 9
      GRPC-Web
    CONS OF ENVOY
      Be the first to leave a con

      related Envoy posts

      Noah Zoschke
      Engineering Manager at Segment · | 30 upvotes · 496.2K views

      We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. Behind the scenes the Config API is built with Go , GRPC and Envoy.

      At Segment, we build new services in Go by default. The language is simple so new team members quickly ramp up on a codebase. The tool chain is fast so developers get immediate feedback when they break code, tests or integrations with other systems. The runtime is fast so it performs great at scale.

      For the newest round of APIs we adopted the GRPC service #framework.

      The Protocol Buffer service definition language makes it easy to design type-safe and consistent APIs, thanks to ecosystem tools like the Google API Design Guide for API standards, uber/prototool for formatting and linting .protos and lyft/protoc-gen-validate for defining field validations, and grpc-gateway for defining REST mapping.

      With a well designed .proto, its easy to generate a Go server interface and a TypeScript client, providing type-safe RPC between languages.

      For the API gateway and RPC we adopted the Envoy service proxy.

      The internet-facing segmentapis.com endpoint is an Envoy front proxy that rate-limits and authenticates every request. It then transcodes a #REST / #JSON request to an upstream GRPC request. The upstream GRPC servers are running an Envoy sidecar configured for Datadog stats.

      The result is API #security , #reliability and consistent #observability through Envoy configuration, not code.

      We experimented with Swagger service definitions, but the spec is sprawling and the generated clients and server stubs leave a lot to be desired. GRPC and .proto and the Go implementation feels better designed and implemented. Thanks to the GRPC tooling and ecosystem you can generate Swagger from .protos, but it’s effectively impossible to go the other way.

      See more
      Joseph Irving
      DevOps Engineer at uSwitch · | 7 upvotes · 734.6K views
      Shared insights
      on
      KubernetesKubernetesEnvoyEnvoyGolangGolang
      at

      At uSwitch we wanted a way to load balance between our multiple Kubernetes clusters in AWS to give us added redundancy. We already had ingresses defined for all our applications so we wanted to build on top of that, instead of creating a new system that would require our various teams to change code/config etc.

      Envoy seemed to tick a lot of boxes:

      • Loadbalancing capabilities right out of the box: health checks, circuit breaking, retries etc.
      • Tracing and prometheus metrics support
      • Lightweight
      • Good community support

      This was all good but what really sold us was the api that supported dynamic configuration. This would allow us to dynamically configure envoy to route to ingresses and clusters as they were created or destroyed.

      To do this we built a tool called Yggdrasil using their Go sdk. Yggdrasil effectively just creates envoy configuration from Kubernetes ingress objects, so you point Yggdrasil at your kube clusters, it generates config from the ingresses and then envoy can loadbalance between your clusters for you. This is all done dynamically so as soon as new ingress is created the envoy nodes get updated with the new config. Importantly this all worked with what we already had, no need to create new config for every application, we just put this on top of it.

      See more
      Microsoft IIS logo

      Microsoft IIS

      15.4K
      236
      A web server for Microsoft Windows
      15.4K
      236
      PROS OF MICROSOFT IIS
      • 83
        Great with .net
      • 55
        I'm forced to use iis
      • 27
        Use nginx
      • 18
        Azure integration
      • 15
        Best for ms technologyes ms bullshit
      • 10
        Fast
      • 6
        Reliable
      • 6
        Performance
      • 4
        Powerful
      • 3
        Simple to configure
      • 3
        Webserver
      • 2
        Easy setup
      • 1
        Shipped with Windows Server
      • 1
        Ssl integration
      • 1
        Security
      • 1
        Охуенный
      CONS OF MICROSOFT IIS
      • 1
        Hard to set up

      related Microsoft IIS posts

      I am currently in school for computer science and am doing a class project about web servers. Our assignment is to research and select one of these web servers. Could you please let me know which one you would choose among NGINX, Microsoft IIS, and Apache HTTP Server and why?

      See more

      Hi, I have an old web app written in HTML and JavaScript and hosted at Microsoft IIS. But due to some restrictions on the production environment, we can not enable IIS. I tried to create an Owin app and hosted it in a desktop service and everything is working fine. But I am not aware of the Pros and Cons of using OWIN app and hosting in windows service. Can anyone please tell me the Pros and Cons of using OWIN interface and windows service and also if there are any other alternatives available and why should I go for that alternative? Note: All of my web app pages are static pages. Thanks, Nirbhay

      See more
      Varnish logo

      Varnish

      12.5K
      370
      High-performance HTTP accelerator
      12.5K
      370
      PROS OF VARNISH
      • 104
        High-performance
      • 67
        Very Fast
      • 57
        Very Stable
      • 44
        Very Robust
      • 37
        HTTP reverse proxy
      • 21
        Open Source
      • 18
        Web application accelerator
      • 11
        Easy to config
      • 5
        Widely Used
      • 4
        Great community
      • 2
        Essential software for HTTP
      CONS OF VARNISH
        Be the first to leave a con

        related Varnish posts

        Around the time of their Series A, Pinterest’s stack included Python and Django, with Tornado and Node.js as web servers. Memcached / Membase and Redis handled caching, with RabbitMQ handling queueing. Nginx, HAproxy and Varnish managed static-delivery and load-balancing, with persistent data storage handled by MySQL.

        See more
        Tom Klein

        We're using Git through GitHub for public repositories and GitLab for our private repositories due to its easy to use features. Docker and Kubernetes are a must have for our highly scalable infrastructure complimented by HAProxy with Varnish in front of it. We are using a lot of npm and Visual Studio Code in our development sessions.

        See more
        Apache Tomcat logo

        Apache Tomcat

        16.6K
        201
        An open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies
        16.6K
        201
        PROS OF APACHE TOMCAT
        • 79
          Easy
        • 72
          Java
        • 49
          Popular
        • 1
          Spring web
        CONS OF APACHE TOMCAT
        • 3
          Blocking - each http request block a thread
        • 2
          Easy to set up

        related Apache Tomcat posts

        Остап Комплікевич

        I need some advice to choose an engine for generation web pages from the Spring Boot app. Which technology is the best solution today? 1) JSP + JSTL 2) Apache FreeMarker 3) Thymeleaf Or you can suggest even other perspective tools. I am using Spring Boot, Spring Web, Spring Data, Spring Security, PostgreSQL, Apache Tomcat in my project. I have already tried to generate pages using jsp, jstl, and it went well. However, I had huge problems via carrying already created static pages, to jsp format, because of syntax. Thanks.

        See more

        Java Spring JUnit

        Apache HTTP Server Apache Tomcat

        MySQL

        See more