Cowboy vs Mongoose Web Server vs NGINX

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Cowboy

669
72
+ 1
19
Mongoose Web Server

12
37
+ 1
3
NGINX

113.3K
60.9K
+ 1
5.5K

Cowboy vs Mongoose Web Server vs nginx: What are the differences?

## Introduction

Key differences between Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server and nginx are highlighted below:

1. **Performance**: Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server are designed to handle long-lasting connections efficiently, making them suitable for applications requiring high concurrency. On the other hand, Nginx is known for its efficiency in serving static content and reverse proxy capabilities, making it ideal for caching and load balancing.

2. **Protocol Support**: Cowboy primarily focuses on supporting the HTTP protocol and WebSockets, providing a robust foundation for building modern web applications. In contrast, Nginx supports a wider range of protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, POP3, and IMAP, making it versatile for various networking tasks.

3. **Configuration**: Nginx offers a highly flexible and easy-to-understand configuration file syntax, allowing administrators to customize the server behavior extensively. In comparison, Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server typically require less configuration due to their simpler nature, making them easier to set up for basic use cases.

4. **Use Cases**: Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server are well-suited for applications that require real-time communication or streaming capabilities, as they can efficiently handle continuous connections. Conversely, Nginx excels in scenarios where caching, load balancing, and serving static content are essential, making it a popular choice for web servers.

5. **Community and Ecosystem**: Nginx boasts a large and active community of users and developers, offering a plethora of third-party modules and plugins to extend its functionality. In contrast, Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server have smaller but dedicated communities, focusing on providing lightweight and efficient web server solutions.

6. **Scalability**: When it comes to scalability, Nginx is often preferred for handling high traffic loads and distributing requests across multiple servers or instances due to its robust proxying capabilities and load-balancing algorithms. While Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server can also scale effectively, they are more commonly used in scenarios requiring high concurrency and real-time communication rather than massive scalability requirements.

In Summary, the key differences between Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server and nginx lie in their performance focus, protocol support, configuration options, use cases, community support, and scalability capabilities.
Advice on Cowboy, Mongoose Web Server, and NGINX

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!

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Replies (1)
Simon Aronsson
Developer Advocate at k6 / Load Impact · | 4 upvotes · 714.7K views
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

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.

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Needs advice
on
Apache HTTP ServerApache HTTP Server
and
NGINXNGINX

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."

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Replies (3)
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

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.

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Leandro Barral
Recommends
on
NGINXNGINX

I use nginx because its more flexible and easy to configure

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Christian Cwienk
Software Developer at SAP · | 1 upvotes · 680.9K views
Recommends
on
Apache HTTP ServerApache HTTP Server

I use Apache HTTP Server because it's intuitive, comprehensive, well-documented, and just works

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Decisions about Cowboy, Mongoose Web Server, and NGINX
Daniel Calvo
Co-Founder at Polpo Data Analytics & Software Development · | 8 upvotes · 267.9K views

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.

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Grant Steuart
  • 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.
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Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
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Pros of Cowboy
Pros of Mongoose Web Server
Pros of NGINX
  • 8
    Websockets integration
  • 6
    Cool name
  • 3
    Good to use with Erlang
  • 2
    Anime mascot
  • 1
    Light weight
  • 1
    Easy to configure
  • 1
    Web server
  • 1.4K
    High-performance http server
  • 894
    Performance
  • 730
    Easy to configure
  • 607
    Open source
  • 530
    Load balancer
  • 289
    Free
  • 288
    Scalability
  • 226
    Web server
  • 175
    Simplicity
  • 136
    Easy setup
  • 30
    Content caching
  • 21
    Web Accelerator
  • 15
    Capability
  • 14
    Fast
  • 12
    High-latency
  • 12
    Predictability
  • 8
    Reverse Proxy
  • 7
    The best of them
  • 7
    Supports http/2
  • 5
    Great Community
  • 5
    Lots of Modules
  • 5
    Enterprise version
  • 4
    High perfomance proxy server
  • 3
    Embedded Lua scripting
  • 3
    Streaming media delivery
  • 3
    Streaming media
  • 3
    Reversy Proxy
  • 2
    Blash
  • 2
    GRPC-Web
  • 2
    Lightweight
  • 2
    Fast and easy to set up
  • 2
    Slim
  • 2
    saltstack
  • 1
    Virtual hosting
  • 1
    Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast
  • 1
    Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior
  • 1
    Ingress controller

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Cons of Cowboy
Cons of Mongoose Web Server
Cons of NGINX
    Be the first to leave a con
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      • 10
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      What is Cowboy?

      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.

      What is Mongoose Web Server?

      Mongoose is built on top of Libmongoose embedded library, which can turn anything into a web server in 5 minutes worth of effort and few lines of code. Libmongoose is used to serve Web GUI on embedded devices, implement RESTful services, RPC frameworks (e.g. JSON-RPC), handle telemetry data exchange, and perform many other tasks in various different industries including aerospace, manufacturing, finance, research, automotive, gaming, IT.

      What is NGINX?

      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.

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      What tools integrate with Cowboy?
      What tools integrate with Mongoose Web Server?
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          What are some alternatives to Cowboy, Mongoose Web Server, and NGINX?
          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.
          Amazon EC2
          It is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
          Firebase
          Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications. Simply add the Firebase library to your application to gain access to a shared data structure; any changes you make to that data are automatically synchronized with the Firebase cloud and with other clients within milliseconds.
          Amazon Web Services (AWS)
          It is a comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally.
          Heroku
          Heroku is a cloud application platform – a new way of building and deploying web apps. Heroku lets app developers spend 100% of their time on their application code, not managing servers, deployment, ongoing operations, or scaling.
          See all alternatives