Gunicorn 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

Gunicorn

Stacks1.3K

Followers908

Votes78

GitHub Stars10.3K

Forks1.8K

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

# Introduction
Key differences between Gunicorn, Microsoft IIS, and Nginx are outlined below.

1. **Architecture**: Gunicorn is a WSGI HTTP server for Python applications, while Microsoft IIS is a web server designed for hosting websites and applications on Windows servers. Nginx, on the other hand, is a lightweight and high-performance web server known for its reverse proxy capabilities.
   
2. **Supported Platforms**: Gunicorn is primarily used in Unix-based systems, while Microsoft IIS is designed for Windows servers. Nginx, on the contrary, can run on both Unix and Windows platforms, giving it more versatility.
   
3. **Ease of Configuration**: Gunicorn requires manual configuration through command-line options or configuration files, which can be more complex for beginners. Microsoft IIS provides a user-friendly graphical interface for configuration, making it easier for administrators to set up websites and manage server settings. Nginx offers a middle ground with a text-based configuration that provides more flexibility than a GUI but may require more expertise than Microsoft IIS.
   
4. **Scalability and Performance**: Gunicorn is suitable for small to medium-sized applications, while Microsoft IIS is better equipped to handle large-scale enterprise applications with features like load balancing and clustering. Nginx is known for its high scalability and performance optimization, making it a popular choice for websites with high traffic volumes.
   
5. **Community Support**: Gunicorn has a smaller user community compared to Microsoft IIS and Nginx, resulting in potentially fewer resources and community-driven plugins. Microsoft IIS benefits from extensive support from Microsoft and a large user base, making it easier to find solutions and resources online. Nginx has a robust user community and extensive documentation, providing ample resources and plugins for users to leverage.
   
6. **Security Features**: Microsoft IIS includes advanced security features such as request filtering, SSL/TLS support, and integrated Windows authentication. Nginx also offers security features like HTTPS support, rate limiting, and access control, making it a popular choice for securing web applications. Gunicorn, being a Python-specific server, may require additional security measures to be implemented at the application level.

In Summary, Gunicorn, Microsoft IIS, and Nginx differ in architecture, supported platforms, ease of configuration, scalability, performance, community support, and security features.

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Advice on NGINX, Microsoft IIS, Gunicorn

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	Gunicorn
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.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 28.4K	GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 10.3K
GitHub Forks 7.6K	GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 1.8K
Stacks 115.0K	Stacks 15.5K	Stacks 1.3K
Followers 61.9K	Followers 7.7K	Followers 908
Votes 5.5K	Votes 236	Votes 78
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 34 Python 30 Easy setup 8 Reliable 3 Fast 3 Light

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

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.

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.

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.

Related Comparisons

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

# Introduction
Key differences between Gunicorn, Microsoft IIS, and Nginx are outlined below.

1. **Architecture**: Gunicorn is a WSGI HTTP server for Python applications, while Microsoft IIS is a web server designed for hosting websites and applications on Windows servers. Nginx, on the other hand, is a lightweight and high-performance web server known for its reverse proxy capabilities.
   
2. **Supported Platforms**: Gunicorn is primarily used in Unix-based systems, while Microsoft IIS is designed for Windows servers. Nginx, on the contrary, can run on both Unix and Windows platforms, giving it more versatility.
   
3. **Ease of Configuration**: Gunicorn requires manual configuration through command-line options or configuration files, which can be more complex for beginners. Microsoft IIS provides a user-friendly graphical interface for configuration, making it easier for administrators to set up websites and manage server settings. Nginx offers a middle ground with a text-based configuration that provides more flexibility than a GUI but may require more expertise than Microsoft IIS.
   
4. **Scalability and Performance**: Gunicorn is suitable for small to medium-sized applications, while Microsoft IIS is better equipped to handle large-scale enterprise applications with features like load balancing and clustering. Nginx is known for its high scalability and performance optimization, making it a popular choice for websites with high traffic volumes.
   
5. **Community Support**: Gunicorn has a smaller user community compared to Microsoft IIS and Nginx, resulting in potentially fewer resources and community-driven plugins. Microsoft IIS benefits from extensive support from Microsoft and a large user base, making it easier to find solutions and resources online. Nginx has a robust user community and extensive documentation, providing ample resources and plugins for users to leverage.
   
6. **Security Features**: Microsoft IIS includes advanced security features such as request filtering, SSL/TLS support, and integrated Windows authentication. Nginx also offers security features like HTTPS support, rate limiting, and access control, making it a popular choice for securing web applications. Gunicorn, being a Python-specific server, may require additional security measures to be implemented at the application level.

In Summary, Gunicorn, Microsoft IIS, and Nginx differ in architecture, supported platforms, ease of configuration, scalability, performance, community support, and security features.

Gunicorn vs Microsoft IIS vs nginx

Overview