Microsoft IIS vs Mongoose Web Server vs nginx

Overview

NGINX

Stacks115.0K

Followers61.9K

Votes5.5K

GitHub Stars28.4K

Forks7.6K

Microsoft IIS

Stacks15.5K

Followers7.7K

Votes236

Mongoose Web Server

Stacks12

Followers37

Votes3

GitHub Stars12.3K

Forks2.9K

Microsoft IIS vs Mongoose Web Server vs nginx: What are the differences?

Introduction:

In the realm of web servers, Microsoft IIS, Mongoose Web Server, and nginx are popular choices among developers for hosting websites. Each of these servers has its unique features and functionalities that cater to different needs of users.

1. Performance and scalability: Microsoft IIS is known for its performance and scalability, making it a preferred choice for large websites with high traffic. Mongoose Web Server, on the other hand, is lightweight and designed for embedded systems, making it efficient for IoT devices. Nginx falls in between, offering a balance of performance and scalability suitable for a range of websites.

2. Support for platforms: Microsoft IIS is mainly designed for Windows servers, which may limit its compatibility with other platforms. Mongoose Web Server is versatile and can run on various platforms, including Windows, Linux, and macOS. Nginx is known for its cross-platform compatibility, running smoothly on Windows, Linux, and Unix-based systems.

3. Configuration and customization: Microsoft IIS provides a user-friendly interface for configuration, making it easier for beginners to set up websites. Mongoose Web Server offers minimal configuration options, ideal for straightforward setups. Nginx is highly customizable through its configuration files, allowing advanced users to fine-tune settings for optimal performance.

4. Module support: Microsoft IIS has a vast array of modules available for extending its functionality, allowing users to add features as needed. Mongoose Web Server is more limited in terms of modules but is designed to be lightweight and efficient. Nginx boasts a rich set of modules, offering users flexibility in customizing their web server setup.

5. Security features: Microsoft IIS has robust security features built-in, including support for SSL/TLS encryption and advanced access control settings. Mongoose Web Server focuses more on simplicity and may lack some advanced security measures found in other servers. Nginx is renowned for its security capabilities, with features like rate limiting, DDoS protection, and secure communication protocols.

6. Community and support: Microsoft IIS benefits from strong support from Microsoft and a large user community, ensuring users can find extensive resources and help online. Mongoose Web Server has a smaller community due to its niche use cases, but users can still access forums and documentation for assistance. Nginx has a thriving open-source community, providing users with a wealth of resources, plugins, and community-contributed modules.

In Summary, the key differences between Microsoft IIS, Mongoose Web Server, and nginx lie in performance, platform support, configuration options, module availability, security features, and community support.

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Advice on NGINX, Microsoft IIS, Mongoose Web Server

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	Mongoose Web Server
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.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 28.4K	GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 12.3K
GitHub Forks 7.6K	GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 2.9K
Stacks 115.0K	Stacks 15.5K	Stacks 12
Followers 61.9K	Followers 7.7K	Followers 37
Votes 5.5K	Votes 236	Votes 3
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 1 Web server 1 Easy to configure 1 Light weight

What are some alternatives to NGINX, Microsoft IIS, Mongoose Web 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 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.

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 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.