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

Caddy vs Cowboy

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Cowboy
Cowboy
Stacks711
Followers72
Votes19
GitHub Stars7.4K
Forks1.2K
Caddy
Caddy
Stacks363
Followers282
Votes20
GitHub Stars67.7K
Forks4.5K

Caddy vs Cowboy: What are the differences?

## Key Differences between Caddy and Cowboy

Caddy is a modern, efficient, and easy-to-use web server written in Go, while Cowboy is a lightweight, fast, and scalable web server developed in Erlang. Caddy comes with an automatic HTTPS feature that sets up SSL certificates for you, simplifying the process of securing your websites. On the other hand, Cowboy requires manual configuration to enable HTTPS, making it more suitable for users who prefer fine-grained control over their server setup. Additionally, Caddy provides a user-friendly web interface that allows for easy configuration and management of server settings, whereas Cowboy prioritizes performance and simplicity over a graphical interface. When it comes to extensibility, Caddy offers a robust plugin system that allows users to easily extend its functionality with third-party plugins, while Cowboy requires more manual integration for adding custom features or functionalities. In terms of community support, Caddy has a growing community and active development, resulting in regular updates and new features, whereas Cowboy has a well-established community within the Erlang ecosystem, providing stability and reliability for Erlang developers. Overall, the choice between Caddy and Cowboy depends on your specific needs for features, ease of use, and level of control over your web server setup.

## Summary

In Summary, Caddy and Cowboy differ in their approach to HTTPS setup, user interface, extensibility, and community support, catering to users with varying preferences and requirements.

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Detailed Comparison

Cowboy
Cowboy
Caddy
Caddy

Cowboy aims to provide a complete HTTP stack in a small code base. It is optimized for low latency and low memory usage, in part because it uses binary strings. Cowboy provides routing capabilities, selectively dispatching requests to handlers written in Erlang.

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

-
Static file server; Reverse proxy; Load balancing; Automatic HTTPS; TLS by default; Caddyfile; Config API; Config adapters; HTTP/1.1; HTTP/2; HTTP/3; Virtual hosting; TLS ceritificate auto-renew; Extensible; No dependencies; Fewer moving parts
Statistics
GitHub Stars
7.4K
GitHub Stars
67.7K
GitHub Forks
1.2K
GitHub Forks
4.5K
Stacks
711
Stacks
363
Followers
72
Followers
282
Votes
19
Votes
20
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 8
    Websockets integration
  • 6
    Cool name
  • 3
    Good to use with Erlang
  • 2
    Anime mascot
Pros
  • 6
    Sane config file syntax
  • 6
    Easy HTTP/2 Server Push
  • 4
    Builtin HTTPS
  • 2
    Letsencrypt support
  • 2
    Runtime config API
Cons
  • 3
    New kid

What are some alternatives to Cowboy, Caddy?

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.

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