Cowboy vs Mongoose Web Server: What are the differences?

What is Cowboy? Small, fast, modular HTTP server written in Erlang. 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.

What is Mongoose Web Server? The most easy to use web server on the planet. 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.

Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server can be primarily classified as "Web Servers" tools.

Cowboy and Mongoose Web Server are both open source tools. It seems that Cowboy with 5.59K GitHub stars and 999 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Mongoose Web Server with 5.51K GitHub stars and 1.61K GitHub forks.