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Cowboy vs Passenger: What are the differences?
What is Cowboy? Small, fast, modular HTTP server written in Erlang. 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 Passenger? A fast and robust web server and application server for Ruby, Python and Node.js. 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.
Cowboy and Passenger belong to "Web Servers" category of the tech stack.
"Websockets integration" is the primary reason why developers consider Cowboy over the competitors, whereas "Nginx integration" was stated as the key factor in picking Passenger.
Cowboy and Passenger are both open source tools. It seems that Cowboy with 5.59K GitHub stars and 999 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Passenger with 4.41K GitHub stars and 505 GitHub forks.
Pros of Cowboy
- Websockets integration8
- Cool name6
- Good to use with Erlang3
- Anime mascot2
Pros of Passenger
- Nginx integration43
- Great for rails36
- Fast web server21
- Free19
- Lightweight15
- Scalable14
- Rolling restarts13
- Multithreading10
- Out-of-process architecture9
- Low-bandwidth6
- Virtually infinitely scalable2
- Deployment error resistance2
- Mass deployment2
- High-latency2
- Many of its good features are only enterprise level1
- Apache integration1
- Secure1
- Asynchronous I/O1
- Multiple programming language support1
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Cons of Cowboy
Cons of Passenger
- Cost (some features require paid/pro)0