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Caddy vs nginx: What are the differences?
Caddy: The HTTP/2 Web Server with Automatic HTTPS. Caddy is a production-ready open-source web server that is fast, easy to use, and makes you more productive. HTTP/2 and HTTPS by default; nginx: A high performance free open source web server powering busiest sites on the Internet. nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.
Caddy and nginx belong to "Web Servers" category of the tech stack.
"Easy HTTP/2 Server Push" is the primary reason why developers consider Caddy over the competitors, whereas "High-performance http server" was stated as the key factor in picking nginx.
Caddy and nginx are both open source tools. Caddy with 22.7K GitHub stars and 1.79K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than nginx with 9.1K GitHub stars and 3.43K GitHub forks.
Airbnb, Uber Technologies, and Spotify are some of the popular companies that use nginx, whereas Caddy is used by RELEX Solutions, AresRPG, and Fresh8 Gaming. nginx has a broader approval, being mentioned in 8670 company stacks & 2556 developers stacks; compared to Caddy, which is listed in 14 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.
I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities. Ready, aim fire!
I would pick nginx over both IIS and Apace HTTP Server any day. Combine it with docker, and as you grow maybe even traefik, and you'll have a really flexible solution for serving http content where you can take sites and projects up and down without effort, easily move it between systems and dont have to handle any dependencies on your actual local machine.
From a StackShare Community member: "We are a LAMP shop currently focused on improving web performance for our customers. We have made many front-end optimizations and now we are considering replacing Apache with nginx. I was wondering if others saw a noticeable performance gain or any other benefits by switching."
I use nginx because it is very light weight. Where Apache tries to include everything in the web server, nginx opts to have external programs/facilities take care of that so the web server can focus on efficiently serving web pages. While this can seem inefficient, it limits the number of new bugs found in the web server, which is the element that faces the client most directly.
I use nginx because its more flexible and easy to configure
I use Apache HTTP Server because it's intuitive, comprehensive, well-documented, and just works
- Server rendered HTML output from PHP is being migrated to the client as Vue.js components, future plans to provide additional content, and other new miscellaneous features all result in a substantial increase of static files needing to be served from the server. NGINX has better performance than Apache for serving static content.
- The change to NGINX will require switching from PHP to PHP-FPM resulting in a distributed architecture with a higher complexity configuration, but this is outweighed by PHP-FPM being faster than PHP for processing requests.
- The NGINX + PHP-FPM setup now allows for horizontally scaling of resources rather vertically scaling the previously combined Apache + PHP resources.
- PHP shell tasks can now efficiently be decoupled from the application reducing main application footprint and allow for scaling of tasks on an individual basis.
Pros of Caddy
- Easy HTTP/2 Server Push6
- Sane config file syntax6
- Builtin HTTPS4
- Letsencrypt support2
- Runtime config API2
Pros of NGINX
- High-performance http server1.4K
- Performance893
- Easy to configure729
- Open source607
- Load balancer530
- Scalability288
- Free288
- Web server225
- Simplicity175
- Easy setup136
- Content caching30
- Web Accelerator21
- Capability15
- Fast14
- High-latency12
- Predictability12
- Reverse Proxy8
- The best of them7
- Supports http/27
- Great Community5
- Lots of Modules5
- Enterprise version5
- High perfomance proxy server4
- Reversy Proxy3
- Streaming media delivery3
- Streaming media3
- Embedded Lua scripting3
- GRPC-Web2
- Blash2
- Lightweight2
- Fast and easy to set up2
- Slim2
- saltstack2
- Virtual hosting1
- Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast1
- Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior1
- Ingress controller1
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Cons of Caddy
- New kid3
Cons of NGINX
- Advanced features require subscription9
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