Caddy vs nginx

Overview

NGINX

Stacks115.0K

Followers61.9K

Votes5.5K

GitHub Stars28.4K

Forks7.6K

Caddy

Stacks363

Followers282

Votes20

GitHub Stars67.7K

Forks4.5K

Caddy vs nginx: What are the differences?

Caddy and nginx are both popular web servers that offer various features and capabilities. Here are the key differences that set them apart.

Easy Configuration: Caddy focuses on simplicity and ease of use, providing a user-friendly approach to configuration. It automatically generates SSL certificates and supports HTTPS by default. On the other hand, nginx requires manual configuration for SSL certificates and HTTPS setup.
Automatic HTTPS: Caddy has built-in support for automatic HTTPS through its ACME-based integration. This means that it can automatically obtain and renew SSL certificates without any extra configuration. In contrast, nginx requires additional plugins or modules to enable automatic HTTPS.
Web Server vs. Reverse Proxy: Caddy is primarily designed as a full-featured web server, capable of handling static content, dynamic content, and reverse proxying. It can serve and proxy HTTP and HTTPS requests. Nginx, on the other hand, is primarily known as a high-performance reverse proxy server. It excels at forwarding and load balancing requests to backend servers.
Configuration Languages: Caddy uses a simple, human-readable configuration format inspired by the Caddyfile, which makes it easier for users to understand and modify. In contrast, nginx uses a more complex configuration language that requires a steeper learning curve for beginners.
Extensibility: Nginx has been around for a longer time and has a vast ecosystem of modules and plugins developed by the community. It offers more flexibility and extensibility options, allowing advanced customization and integration with other systems. Caddy, although it supports plugins, has a more limited selection compared to nginx.
Resource Usage: Caddy is aimed at being resource-friendly, designed to use fewer system resources such as CPU and memory compared to nginx. This can be advantageous in scenarios where efficiency and performance are crucial, particularly in low-resource environments.

In summary, Caddy emphasizes simplicity, automatic HTTPS, and ease of configuration, while nginx offers a more comprehensive set of features, extensibility options, and is well-suited for reverse proxying.

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)

Manual

Advice on NGINX, Caddy

greg00m

Mar 9, 2020

Needs advice

I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities.
Ready, aim fire!

766k views766k

Comments

Grant

Developer at GMS LLC

Sep 5, 2020

Decided

Server rendered HTML output from PHP is being migrated to the client as Vue.js components, future plans to provide additional content, and other new miscellaneous features all result in a substantial increase of static files needing to be served from the server. NGINX has better performance than Apache for serving static content.
The change to NGINX will require switching from PHP to PHP-FPM resulting in a distributed architecture with a higher complexity configuration, but this is outweighed by PHP-FPM being faster than PHP for processing requests.
The NGINX + PHP-FPM setup now allows for horizontally scaling of resources rather vertically scaling the previously combined Apache + PHP resources.
PHP shell tasks can now efficiently be decoupled from the application reducing main application footprint and allow for scaling of tasks on an individual basis.

429k views429k

Comments

jlp78

May 31, 2019

Reviewon

NGINX

I use nginx because it is very light weight. Where Apache tries to include everything in the web server, nginx opts to have external programs/facilities take care of that so the web server can focus on efficiently serving web pages. While this can seem inefficient, it limits the number of new bugs found in the web server, which is the element that faces the client most directly.

727k views727k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

NGINX	Caddy
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.	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 28.4K	GitHub Stars 67.7K
GitHub Forks 7.6K	GitHub Forks 4.5K
Stacks 115.0K	Stacks 363
Followers 61.9K	Followers 282
Votes 5.5K	Votes 20
Pros & Cons
Pros 1453 High-performance http server 895 Performance 730 Easy to configure 607 Open source 530 Load balancer Cons 10 Advanced features require subscription	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 NGINX, Caddy?

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.

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.

Related Comparisons

Caddy vs nginx: What are the differences?

Caddy and nginx are both popular web servers that offer various features and capabilities. Here are the key differences that set them apart.

Easy Configuration: Caddy focuses on simplicity and ease of use, providing a user-friendly approach to configuration. It automatically generates SSL certificates and supports HTTPS by default. On the other hand, nginx requires manual configuration for SSL certificates and HTTPS setup.
Automatic HTTPS: Caddy has built-in support for automatic HTTPS through its ACME-based integration. This means that it can automatically obtain and renew SSL certificates without any extra configuration. In contrast, nginx requires additional plugins or modules to enable automatic HTTPS.
Web Server vs. Reverse Proxy: Caddy is primarily designed as a full-featured web server, capable of handling static content, dynamic content, and reverse proxying. It can serve and proxy HTTP and HTTPS requests. Nginx, on the other hand, is primarily known as a high-performance reverse proxy server. It excels at forwarding and load balancing requests to backend servers.
Configuration Languages: Caddy uses a simple, human-readable configuration format inspired by the Caddyfile, which makes it easier for users to understand and modify. In contrast, nginx uses a more complex configuration language that requires a steeper learning curve for beginners.
Extensibility: Nginx has been around for a longer time and has a vast ecosystem of modules and plugins developed by the community. It offers more flexibility and extensibility options, allowing advanced customization and integration with other systems. Caddy, although it supports plugins, has a more limited selection compared to nginx.
Resource Usage: Caddy is aimed at being resource-friendly, designed to use fewer system resources such as CPU and memory compared to nginx. This can be advantageous in scenarios where efficiency and performance are crucial, particularly in low-resource environments.

Caddy vs nginx

Overview