Cowboy vs Microsoft IIS vs nginx

Overview

NGINX

Stacks115.0K

Followers61.9K

Votes5.5K

GitHub Stars28.4K

Forks7.6K

Microsoft IIS

Stacks15.5K

Followers7.7K

Votes236

Cowboy

Stacks711

Followers72

Votes19

GitHub Stars7.4K

Forks1.2K

Cowboy vs Microsoft IIS vs nginx: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Cowboy, Microsoft IIS, and nginx

Performance: Cowboy is known for its exceptional performance and speed due to its lightweight design and low resource usage. On the other hand, Microsoft IIS is suited for Windows environments with a focus on supporting .NET applications efficiently. Nginx is highly efficient at handling concurrent connections and requests, making it a popular choice for high-traffic websites.
Platform Support: Cowboy is primarily designed for Erlang applications, while Microsoft IIS is tailored for Windows-based systems. Nginx, on the other hand, is versatile, supporting multiple platforms like Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD.
Configuration: Cowboy offers easy and simple configuration options suitable for developers familiar with Erlang. Microsoft IIS provides a user-friendly interface for configuration and management, making it a preferred choice for Windows administrators. Nginx uses a powerful configuration language that can be complex for beginners but offers extensive flexibility and customization options.
Use Cases: Cowboy is well-suited for building real-time web applications, websockets, and APIs. Microsoft IIS excels in hosting .NET applications, supporting various Microsoft technologies and frameworks. Nginx is commonly used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, or caching server to improve website performance and scalability.
Community and Support: Cowboy has a smaller community compared to Microsoft IIS and Nginx, which have larger user bases and extensive documentation. This difference can impact the availability of resources, tutorials, and community support for each server software.
Security Features: Cowboy offers basic security features, while Microsoft IIS includes robust security mechanisms tailored for Windows environments. Nginx is known for its advanced security capabilities, such as SSL/TLS encryption, HTTP authentication, and DDoS protection, making it a secure choice for production environments.

In summary, Cowboy, Microsoft IIS, and nginx differ in performance, platform support, configuration options, use cases, community support, and security features, catering to different needs and preferences in web server software.

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Advice on NGINX, Microsoft IIS, Cowboy

Daniel

Co-Founder at Polpo Data Analytics & Software Development

May 25, 2021

Decided

For us, NGINX is a lite HTTP server easy to configure. On our research, we found a well-documented software we a lot of support from the community.

We have been using it alongside tools like certbot and it has been a total success.

We can easily configure our sites and have a folder for available vs enabled sites, and with the nginx -t command we can easily check everything is running fine.

289k views289k

Comments

greg00m

Mar 9, 2020

Needs advice

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!

766k views766k

Comments

Grant

Developer at GMS LLC

Sep 5, 2020

Decided

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.

429k views429k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

NGINX	Microsoft IIS	Cowboy
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.	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.	Cowboy aims to provide a complete HTTP stack in a small code base. It is optimized for low latency and low memory usage, in part because it uses binary strings. Cowboy provides routing capabilities, selectively dispatching requests to handlers written in Erlang.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 28.4K	GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 7.4K
GitHub Forks 7.6K	GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.2K
Stacks 115.0K	Stacks 15.5K	Stacks 711
Followers 61.9K	Followers 7.7K	Followers 72
Votes 5.5K	Votes 236	Votes 19
Pros & Cons
Pros 1453 High-performance http server 895 Performance 730 Easy to configure 607 Open source 530 Load balancer Cons 10 Advanced features require subscription	Pros 83 Great with .net 55 I'm forced to use iis 27 Use nginx 18 Azure integration 15 Best for ms technologyes ms bullshit Cons 1 Hard to set up	Pros 8 Websockets integration 6 Cool name 3 Good to use with Erlang 2 Anime mascot

What are some alternatives to NGINX, Microsoft IIS, Cowboy?

Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server is a powerful and flexible HTTP/1.1 compliant web server. Originally designed as a replacement for the NCSA HTTP Server, it has grown to be the most popular web server on the Internet.

Unicorn

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

Apache Tomcat

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

Passenger

Phusion Passenger is a web server and application server, designed to be fast, robust and lightweight. It takes a lot of complexity out of deploying web apps, adds powerful enterprise-grade features that are useful in production, and makes administration much easier and less complex.

Gunicorn

Gunicorn is a pre-fork worker model ported from Ruby's Unicorn project. The Gunicorn server is broadly compatible with various web frameworks, simply implemented, light on server resources, and fairly speedy.

Jetty

Jetty is used in a wide variety of projects and products, both in development and production. Jetty can be easily embedded in devices, tools, frameworks, application servers, and clusters. See the Jetty Powered page for more uses of Jetty.

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.

Swoole

It is an open source high-performance network framework using an event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking I/O model which makes it scalable and efficient.

Puma

Unlike other Ruby Webservers, Puma was built for speed and parallelism. Puma is a small library that provides a very fast and concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby web applications.

Caddy

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

Related Comparisons

Cowboy vs Microsoft IIS vs nginx: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Cowboy, Microsoft IIS, and nginx

Performance: Cowboy is known for its exceptional performance and speed due to its lightweight design and low resource usage. On the other hand, Microsoft IIS is suited for Windows environments with a focus on supporting .NET applications efficiently. Nginx is highly efficient at handling concurrent connections and requests, making it a popular choice for high-traffic websites.
Platform Support: Cowboy is primarily designed for Erlang applications, while Microsoft IIS is tailored for Windows-based systems. Nginx, on the other hand, is versatile, supporting multiple platforms like Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD.
Configuration: Cowboy offers easy and simple configuration options suitable for developers familiar with Erlang. Microsoft IIS provides a user-friendly interface for configuration and management, making it a preferred choice for Windows administrators. Nginx uses a powerful configuration language that can be complex for beginners but offers extensive flexibility and customization options.
Use Cases: Cowboy is well-suited for building real-time web applications, websockets, and APIs. Microsoft IIS excels in hosting .NET applications, supporting various Microsoft technologies and frameworks. Nginx is commonly used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, or caching server to improve website performance and scalability.
Community and Support: Cowboy has a smaller community compared to Microsoft IIS and Nginx, which have larger user bases and extensive documentation. This difference can impact the availability of resources, tutorials, and community support for each server software.
Security Features: Cowboy offers basic security features, while Microsoft IIS includes robust security mechanisms tailored for Windows environments. Nginx is known for its advanced security capabilities, such as SSL/TLS encryption, HTTP authentication, and DDoS protection, making it a secure choice for production environments.

Cowboy vs Microsoft IIS vs nginx

Overview