StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Platform as a Service
  4. Web Servers
  5. Pow vs Puma

Pow vs Puma

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Puma
Puma
Stacks1.2K
Followers265
Votes20
GitHub Stars7.8K
Forks1.5K
Pow
Pow
Stacks6
Followers8
Votes0
GitHub Stars3.4K
Forks256

Pow vs Puma: What are the differences?

What is Pow? Zero-configuration Rack server for Mac OS X. Pow is a zero-configuration Rack server for Mac OS X. It makes developing Rails and Rack applications as frictionless as possible. You can install it in ten seconds and have your first app up and running in under a minute. No mucking around with /etc/hosts, no compiling Apache modules, no editing configuration files or installing preference panes. And running multiple apps with multiple versions of Ruby is trivial.

What is Puma? A Modern, Concurrent Web Server for Ruby. 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.

Pow and Puma can be categorized as "Web Servers" tools.

Pow and Puma are both open source tools. It seems that Puma with 5.73K GitHub stars and 974 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Pow with 3.47K GitHub stars and 258 GitHub forks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Puma, Pow

Mark
Mark

Software Developer at Nouveta

Mar 4, 2022

Needs adviceonRailsRailsRubyRubyPumaPuma

I have an integration service that pulls data from third party systems saves it and returns it to the user of the service. We can pull large data sets with the service and response JSON can go up to 5MB with gzip compression. I currently use Rails 6 and Ruby 2.7.2 and Puma web server. Slow clients tend to prevent other users from accessing the system. Am considering a switch to Unicorn.

38.4k views38.4k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Puma
Puma
Pow
Pow

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.

Pow is a zero-configuration Rack server for Mac OS X. It makes developing Rails and Rack applications as frictionless as possible. You can install it in ten seconds and have your first app up and running in under a minute. No mucking around with /etc/hosts, no compiling Apache modules, no editing configuration files or installing preference panes. And running multiple apps with multiple versions of Ruby is trivial.

Statistics
GitHub Stars
7.8K
GitHub Stars
3.4K
GitHub Forks
1.5K
GitHub Forks
256
Stacks
1.2K
Stacks
6
Followers
265
Followers
8
Votes
20
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 4
    Free
  • 3
    Easy
  • 3
    Convenient
  • 2
    Consumes less memory than Unicorn
  • 2
    Multithreaded
Cons
  • 0
    Uses `select` (limited client count)
No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available
Ruby
Ruby

What are some alternatives to Puma, Pow?

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.

Passenger

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

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.

lighttpd

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

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.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase