Caddy vs NGINX Unit

Overview

Caddy

Stacks363

Followers282

Votes20

GitHub Stars67.7K

Forks4.5K

NGINX Unit

Stacks86

Followers199

Votes11

GitHub Stars5.6K

Forks365

Caddy vs NGINX Unit: What are the differences?

Caddy: The HTTP/2 Web Server with Automatic HTTPS. Caddy is a production-ready open-source web server that is fast, easy to use, and makes you more productive. HTTP/2 and HTTPS by default; NGINX Unit: A dynamic web and application server with Go, PHP, Python, Perl, and Ruby support. NGINX Unit is a dynamic web application server, designed to run applications in multiple languages. Unit is lightweight, polyglot, and dynamically configured via API. The design of the server allows reconfiguration of specific application parameters as needed by the engineering or operations.

Caddy and NGINX Unit can be categorized as "Web Servers" tools.

Some of the features offered by Caddy are:

Easy configuration with the Caddyfile
Automatic HTTPS on by default (via Let's Encrypt)
HTTP/2 by default

On the other hand, NGINX Unit provides the following key features:

Fully dynamic reconfiguration using RESTful JSON API
Multiple application languages and versions can run simultaneously
Dynamic application processes management (coming soon)

Caddy and NGINX Unit are both open source tools. Caddy with 22.7K GitHub stars and 1.79K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than NGINX Unit with 1.98K GitHub stars and 141 GitHub forks.

inFeedo, Put.io, and Centra are some of the popular companies that use NGINX Unit, whereas Caddy is used by RELEX Solutions, AresRPG, and Fresh8 Gaming. NGINX Unit has a broader approval, being mentioned in 11 company stacks & 8 developers stacks; compared to Caddy, which is listed in 14 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Caddy	NGINX Unit
Caddy 2 is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go.	NGINX Unit is a dynamic web application server, designed to run applications in multiple languages. Unit is lightweight, polyglot, and dynamically configured via API. The design of the server allows reconfiguration of specific application parameters as needed by the engineering or operations.
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	Fully dynamic reconfiguration using RESTful JSON API;Multiple application languages and versions can run simultaneously;Dynamic application processes management (coming soon);TLS support (coming soon);TCP, HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP/2 routing and proxying (coming soon)
Statistics
GitHub Stars 67.7K	GitHub Stars 5.6K
GitHub Forks 4.5K	GitHub Forks 365
Stacks 363	Stacks 86
Followers 282	Followers 199
Votes 20	Votes 11
Pros & Cons
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	Pros 3 PHP 2 Python 2 Golang 2 Multilang 1 Node.js
Integrations
No integrations available	Perl Python Golang PHP Ruby

What are some alternatives to Caddy, NGINX Unit?

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.

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

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 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.