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

Caddy vs Unicorn

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Unicorn
Unicorn
Stacks479
Followers401
Votes295
GitHub Stars1.5K
Forks269
Caddy
Caddy
Stacks363
Followers282
Votes20
GitHub Stars67.7K
Forks4.5K

Caddy vs Unicorn: What are the differences?

What is 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.

What is Unicorn? Rack HTTP server for fast clients and Unix. 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.

Caddy and Unicorn can be categorized as "Web Servers" tools.

"Easy HTTP/2 Server Push" is the top reason why over 2 developers like Caddy, while over 80 developers mention "Fast" as the leading cause for choosing Unicorn.

Caddy and Unicorn are both open source tools. Caddy with 22.7K GitHub stars and 1.79K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Unicorn with 1.35K GitHub stars and 249 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Unicorn has a broader approval, being mentioned in 176 company stacks & 55 developers stacks; compared to Caddy, which is listed in 14 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Unicorn
Unicorn
Caddy
Caddy

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.

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
1.5K
GitHub Stars
67.7K
GitHub Forks
269
GitHub Forks
4.5K
Stacks
479
Stacks
363
Followers
401
Followers
282
Votes
295
Votes
20
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 81
    Fast
  • 59
    Performance
  • 36
    Web server
  • 30
    Very light
  • 30
    Open Source
Cons
  • 4
    Not multithreaded
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 Unicorn, 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.

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.

Puma

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.

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