What is 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.
Unicorn is a tool in the Web Servers category of a tech stack.
Unicorn is an open source tool with 1.4K GitHub stars and 262 GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Unicorn's open source repository on GitHub
Who uses Unicorn?
Companies
206 companies reportedly use Unicorn in their tech stacks, including Shopify, Instacart, and GitHub.
Developers
271 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Unicorn.
Pros of Unicorn
81
59
36
30
30
27
18
14
Blog Posts
Unicorn Alternatives & Comparisons
What are some alternatives to Unicorn?
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.
Unicorns
Live stream your iPhone or iPad screen. Produced by Lookback.
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
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.
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.
