Compare NGINX to these popular alternatives based on real-world usage and developer feedback.

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.

Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.

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.

OpenResty (aka. ngx_openresty) is a full-fledged web application server by bundling the standard Nginx core, lots of 3rd-party Nginx modules, as well as most of their external dependencies.

It is a drop-in Apache replacement and the leading high-performance, high-scalability server. You can replace your existing Apache server with it without changing your configuration or operating system details. As a drop-in replacement, it allows you to quickly eliminate Apache bottlenecks in 15 minutes with zero downtime.
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 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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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

An application platform for hosting your apps that provides an innovative modular, cloud-ready architecture, powerful management and automation, and world class developer productivity.

An Application Server means, It can manage Java EE applications You should use GlassFish for Java EE enterprise applications. The need for a seperate Web server is mostly needed in a production environment.

It is a flexible, lightweight, managed application runtime that helps you build amazing applications. It supports the latest standards for web development.

It is a coroutine -based Python networking library that uses greenlet to provide a high-level synchronous API on top of the libev or libuv event loop.

An application server for building and deploying enterprise Java EE applications with support for new features for lowering cost of operations, improving performance, enhancing scalability and supporting the Oracle Applications portfolio.

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.

It consists mainly of the Apache HTTP Server, MariaDB database, and interpreters for scripts written in the PHP and Perl programming languages.

It is a family of free and open-source web application servers written in Python, and their associated online community. It stands for "Z Object Publishing Environment", and was the first system using the now common object publishing methodology for the Web

It is a highly scalable, secure and reliable Java EE runtime environment designed to host applications and microservices for any size organization. It supports the Java EE, Jakarta EE and MicroProfile standards-based programming models.

Sanic is a Flask-like Python 3.5+ web server that's written to go fast. It's based on the work done by the amazing folks at magicstack. On top of being Flask-like, Sanic supports async request handlers.

It is a lightning-fast ASGI server, built on uvloop and httptools. Until recently Python has lacked a minimal low-level server/application interface for asyncio frameworks. The ASGI specification fills this gap, and means we're now able to start building a common set of tooling usable across all asyncio frameworks.

It is developed, tested, and supported as community-driven project by a diverse group of individuals and organizations. It is designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using open standards.

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.

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.

It is a flexible performant web server written in java, providing both blocking and non-blocking API’s based on NIO. It has a composition based architecture that allows you to build a web server by combining small single purpose handlers. The gives you the flexibility to choose between a full Java EE servlet 4.0 container, or a low level non-blocking handler, to anything in between.

It Server is a drop in replacement for GlassFish Server Open Source Edition with quarterly releases containing enhancements, bug fixes and patches.

It is very lightweight profile of WebSphere Application Server. It is a flexible and dynamic profile of WAS which enables the WAS server to deploy only required custom features instead of deploying a big set of available JEE components.

Aa low-level library for event-driven programming in PHP. At its core is an event loop, on top of which it provides low-level utilities

It is a web server to push data to a browser, without the browser explicitly requesting it. It is an umbrella term, encompassing multiple techniques for achieving this interaction.

It is a web server and toolkit for developers using the Swift programming language to build applications and other REST services. It lets developers build using only Swift to program both the client-facing and server-side of their projects.

It is a production-ready web server. Rapidly build static sites and client-side applications using Markdown, Sass, CoffeeScript, and more—no configuration necessary.

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.

It is a modern application server for PHP built on top of the Caddy web server. It works with any PHP app and makes your Symfony projects faster than ever thanks to provided integration with the worker mode.

Nodal is a web server for Node.js that was built with the sole purpose of making the developer's life easier.Boasting its own opinionated, explicit, idiomatic and highly-extensible full-service framework, Nodal takes care of all of the hard decisions for you and your team. This allows you to focus on creating an effective product in a short timespan while minimizing technical debt.

It is a loosely coupled PHP library providing developers with tools to create real time, bi-directional applications between clients and servers over WebSockets.

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.

Cherokee is highly efficient, extremely lightweight and provides rock solid stability. Among its many features there is one that deserves special credit: a user friendly interface called cherokee-admin that is provided for a no-hassle configuration of every single feature of the server.

Kore is an easy to use web application framework for writing scalable web APIs in C. Its main goals are security, scalability and allowing rapid development and deployment of such APIs. Because of this Kore is an ideal candidate for building robust, scalable and secure web things.

It is a PHP application server trusted by global innovators, including Fortune 100 companies, with easy-to-use tools and comprehensive services

In development for almost 3 years, Lwan was until now a personal research effort that focused mostly on building a solid infrastructure for a lightweight and speedy web server.
Build your application without worrying about package management or routing. Write your code in a mix of Node.js, React, HTML, MDX, and static files.

It is the missing server for the rapidly growing Flutter community. It is an open-source, scalable app server, written in Dart. It saves time and cost by automatically generating code, providing world-class logging, and revolutionary integration with databases and caching services.