Caddy vs NGINX Unit vs OpenResty

Overview

OpenResty

Stacks2.3K

Followers227

Votes0

Caddy

Stacks363

Followers282

Votes20

GitHub Stars67.7K

Forks4.5K

NGINX Unit

Stacks86

Followers199

Votes11

GitHub Stars5.6K

Forks365

Caddy vs NGINX Unit vs OpenResty: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Caddy, NGINX Unit, and OpenResty are popular web servers used for hosting websites and applications. Each of these servers has its unique features and differences. In this discussion, we will explore the key dissimilarities between Caddy, NGINX Unit, and OpenResty.

Designed Approach: Caddy is known for its simplicity and ease of use, providing automatic HTTPS configuration and a Caddyfile for configuration. NGINX Unit, on the other hand, focuses on dynamic configuration changes without restarting the server, making it a versatile choice for microservices. OpenResty, built on NGINX, is specialized for Lua programming, offering powerful scripting capabilities.
Scalability and Performance: NGINX Unit is designed for high-performance applications with its multi-process architecture and support for multiple languages like PHP, Python, and Go, making it a great choice for scalability. OpenResty, being a full-fledged web platform, provides high performance due to its event-driven architecture and powerful Lua scripting capabilities.
Community Support: Caddy has a smaller but active community that focuses on user-friendly features and ease of configuration. NGINX Unit benefits from the vast NGINX community, providing extensive resources and plugins for various use cases. OpenResty has a strong Lua community, offering support and resources for Lua scripting within the web server environment.
Extensions and Plugins: Caddy offers a plugin ecosystem that allows users to extend functionality easily with minimal configuration. NGINX Unit provides modules for adding specific features or functionalities to the server, giving users more control over customization. OpenResty, with its Lua scripting support, allows users to create custom modules and extensions tailored to their specific needs.
Security Features: Caddy emphasizes security by including automated HTTPS configuration by default, making it a secure choice for websites. NGINX Unit focuses on application isolation and security by providing sandboxing for applications running in different languages. OpenResty, built on NGINX's secure foundation, enhances security through Lua scripting capabilities for fine-grained control over server operations.
Usage and Adoption: Caddy is popular among users looking for a simple and straightforward web server solution, particularly for personal websites and small to medium-sized applications. NGINX Unit is preferred for large-scale applications and microservices architecture due to its dynamic configuration capabilities. OpenResty is commonly used for applications requiring custom scripting and high-performance web serving, especially in scenarios where Lua scripting is necessary.

In Summary, Caddy, NGINX Unit, and OpenResty each have distinct advantages and use cases, ranging from simplicity and ease of use with Caddy to scalability and customization with NGINX Unit and OpenResty.

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

Detailed Comparison

OpenResty	Caddy	NGINX Unit
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.	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 -	GitHub Stars 67.7K	GitHub Stars 5.6K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 4.5K	GitHub Forks 365
Stacks 2.3K	Stacks 363	Stacks 86
Followers 227	Followers 282	Followers 199
Votes 0	Votes 20	Votes 11
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet	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
NGINX	No integrations available	Perl Python Golang PHP Ruby

What are some alternatives to OpenResty, 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.

Related Comparisons

Caddy vs NGINX Unit vs OpenResty: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Designed Approach: Caddy is known for its simplicity and ease of use, providing automatic HTTPS configuration and a Caddyfile for configuration. NGINX Unit, on the other hand, focuses on dynamic configuration changes without restarting the server, making it a versatile choice for microservices. OpenResty, built on NGINX, is specialized for Lua programming, offering powerful scripting capabilities.
Scalability and Performance: NGINX Unit is designed for high-performance applications with its multi-process architecture and support for multiple languages like PHP, Python, and Go, making it a great choice for scalability. OpenResty, being a full-fledged web platform, provides high performance due to its event-driven architecture and powerful Lua scripting capabilities.
Community Support: Caddy has a smaller but active community that focuses on user-friendly features and ease of configuration. NGINX Unit benefits from the vast NGINX community, providing extensive resources and plugins for various use cases. OpenResty has a strong Lua community, offering support and resources for Lua scripting within the web server environment.
Extensions and Plugins: Caddy offers a plugin ecosystem that allows users to extend functionality easily with minimal configuration. NGINX Unit provides modules for adding specific features or functionalities to the server, giving users more control over customization. OpenResty, with its Lua scripting support, allows users to create custom modules and extensions tailored to their specific needs.
Security Features: Caddy emphasizes security by including automated HTTPS configuration by default, making it a secure choice for websites. NGINX Unit focuses on application isolation and security by providing sandboxing for applications running in different languages. OpenResty, built on NGINX's secure foundation, enhances security through Lua scripting capabilities for fine-grained control over server operations.
Usage and Adoption: Caddy is popular among users looking for a simple and straightforward web server solution, particularly for personal websites and small to medium-sized applications. NGINX Unit is preferred for large-scale applications and microservices architecture due to its dynamic configuration capabilities. OpenResty is commonly used for applications requiring custom scripting and high-performance web serving, especially in scenarios where Lua scripting is necessary.

Caddy vs NGINX Unit vs OpenResty

Overview