Gunicorn vs Microsoft IIS vs NGINX

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Gunicorn

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Microsoft IIS

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NGINX

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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.

Advice on Gunicorn, Microsoft IIS, 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 · 620.5K 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 · 590.1K 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 Gunicorn, Microsoft IIS, and NGINX
Daniel Calvo
Co-Founder at Polpo Data Analytics & Software Development · | 8 upvotes · 203.1K 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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Pros of Gunicorn
Pros of Microsoft IIS
Pros of NGINX
  • 34
    Python
  • 30
    Easy setup
  • 8
    Reliable
  • 3
    Light
  • 3
    Fast
  • 83
    Great with .net
  • 55
    I'm forced to use iis
  • 27
    Use nginx
  • 18
    Azure integration
  • 15
    Best for ms technologyes ms bullshit
  • 10
    Fast
  • 6
    Reliable
  • 6
    Performance
  • 4
    Powerful
  • 3
    Simple to configure
  • 3
    Webserver
  • 2
    Easy setup
  • 1
    Shipped with Windows Server
  • 1
    Ssl integration
  • 1
    Security
  • 1
    Охуенный
  • 1.4K
    High-performance http server
  • 893
    Performance
  • 730
    Easy to configure
  • 607
    Open source
  • 530
    Load balancer
  • 288
    Free
  • 288
    Scalability
  • 225
    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
    Reversy Proxy
  • 3
    Streaming media delivery
  • 3
    Streaming media
  • 3
    Embedded Lua scripting
  • 2
    GRPC-Web
  • 2
    Blash
  • 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 Gunicorn
Cons of Microsoft IIS
Cons of NGINX
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 1
      Hard to set up
    • 10
      Advanced features require subscription

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    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is 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.

    What is Microsoft IIS?

    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.

    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 are some alternatives to Gunicorn, Microsoft IIS, and NGINX?
    uWSGI
    The uWSGI project aims at developing a full stack for building hosting services.
    Flask
    Flask is intended for getting started very quickly and was developed with best intentions in mind.
    Waitress
    It is meant to be a production-quality pure-Python WSGI server with very acceptable performance. It has no dependencies except ones which live in the Python standard library. It runs on CPython on Unix and Windows under Python 2.7+ and Python 3.4+. It is also known to run on PyPy 1.6.0 on UNIX.
    gevent
    It is a coroutine -based Python networking library that uses greenlet to provide a high-level synchronous API on top of the libev or libuv event loop.
    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.
    See all alternatives