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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Web Servers
  5. Passenger vs lighttpd

Passenger vs lighttpd

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Passenger
Passenger
Stacks1.4K
Followers298
Votes199
GitHub Stars5.1K
Forks557
lighttpd
lighttpd
Stacks156
Followers133
Votes27

lighttpd vs Passenger: What are the differences?

Developers describe lighttpd as "A secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web-server that has been optimized for high-performance environments". 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. On the other hand, Passenger is detailed as "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.

lighttpd and Passenger can be categorized as "Web Servers" tools.

"Lightweight" is the primary reason why developers consider lighttpd over the competitors, whereas "Nginx integration" was stated as the key factor in picking Passenger.

Passenger is an open source tool with 4.41K GitHub stars and 505 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Passenger's open source repository on GitHub.

Code School, Fab, and Movielala are some of the popular companies that use Passenger, whereas lighttpd is used by WhatsApp, Frame, and Fusionbox. Passenger has a broader approval, being mentioned in 380 company stacks & 40 developers stacks; compared to lighttpd, which is listed in 15 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Passenger
Passenger
lighttpd
lighttpd

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.

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.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
5.1K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
557
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
1.4K
Stacks
156
Followers
298
Followers
133
Votes
199
Votes
27
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 43
    Nginx integration
  • 36
    Great for rails
  • 21
    Fast web server
  • 19
    Free
  • 15
    Lightweight
Cons
  • 0
    Cost (some features require paid/pro)
Pros
  • 7
    Lightweight
  • 6
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Open source
  • 2
    Full featured
  • 2
    Proxy
Integrations
NGINX
NGINX
Python
Python
Ruby
Ruby
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Node.js
Node.js
Meteor
Meteor
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Passenger, lighttpd?

NGINX

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.

Apache HTTP Server

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

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.

Microsoft IIS

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.

Apache Tomcat

Apache Tomcat

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

Gunicorn

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

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.

Swoole

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

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

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

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