Cowboy vs Passenger vs Puma

Overview

Passenger

Stacks1.4K

Followers298

Votes199

GitHub Stars5.1K

Forks557

Puma

Stacks1.2K

Followers265

Votes20

GitHub Stars7.8K

Forks1.5K

Cowboy

Stacks711

Followers72

Votes19

GitHub Stars7.4K

Forks1.2K

Cowboy vs Passenger vs Puma: What are the differences?

# Introduction

Key differences between Cowboy and Passenger and Puma are outlined below:

1. **Concurrency Handling**:
Cowboy uses a single-threaded asynchronous model, while Puma and Passenger are multi-threaded. Cowboy relies on the Erlang VM for concurrency while Puma utilizes multiple threads within a process to handle incoming requests efficiently. Passenger, on the other hand, can spawn multiple processes to handle requests simultaneously.

2. **Configuration Flexibility**:
Passenger provides a user-friendly configuration interface with multiple options for customization, making it easy for developers to adjust settings according to their needs. Puma offers a more streamlined configuration process, ideal for developers looking for simplicity without sacrificing performance. Cowboy, being a low-level framework, requires more manual configuration and customization, suitable for advanced users.

3. **Community Support**:
Passenger has a large community of active users and contributors, resulting in frequent updates, bug fixes, and support. Puma also has a supportive community, but with a focus on performance tuning and optimizations. Cowboy, although reliable, has a smaller community compared to the other two frameworks, which may impact the availability of resources and assistance.

4. **Scalability**:
Puma is known for its superior scalability due to its multi-process/multi-threaded architecture, making it a popular choice for high-traffic applications. Passenger, with its process-spawning capabilities, offers good scalability as well. Cowboy, while highly performant and efficient, may not scale as easily in certain scenarios due to its design limitations.

5. **Integration with Web Servers**:
Passenger integrates directly with popular web servers like Apache and Nginx, offering seamless deployment options for developers. Puma, although capable of running as a standalone HTTP server, can also be integrated with web servers for added flexibility. Cowboy, being a standalone HTTP server, may require additional setup and configuration to work alongside web servers.

6. **Memory Footprint**:
Puma and Passenger tend to have a higher memory footprint compared to Cowboy, which can impact resource usage in memory-constrained environments. Cowboy, optimized for low memory consumption, may be preferable for applications where memory efficiency is a critical factor.

In Summary, Cowboy, Passenger, and Puma differ in concurrency handling, configuration flexibility, community support, scalability, integration with web servers, and memory footprint, offering developers a range of options based on their specific needs.

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View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Passenger	Puma	Cowboy
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.	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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 5.1K	GitHub Stars 7.8K	GitHub Stars 7.4K
GitHub Forks 557	GitHub Forks 1.5K	GitHub Forks 1.2K
Stacks 1.4K	Stacks 1.2K	Stacks 711
Followers 298	Followers 265	Followers 72
Votes 199	Votes 20	Votes 19
Pros & Cons
Pros 43 Nginx integration 36 Great for rails 21 Fast web server 19 Free 15 Lightweight Cons 0 Cost (some features require paid/pro)	Pros 4 Free 3 Convenient 3 Easy 2 Consumes less memory than Unicorn 2 Multithreaded Cons 0 Uses `select` (limited client count)	Pros 8 Websockets integration 6 Cool name 3 Good to use with Erlang 2 Anime mascot
Integrations
NGINX Python Ruby Apache HTTP Server Node.js Meteor	No integrations available	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Passenger, Puma, Cowboy?

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.

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.

Caddy

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

Related Comparisons

Cowboy vs Passenger vs Puma: What are the differences?

# Introduction

Key differences between Cowboy and Passenger and Puma are outlined below:

1. **Concurrency Handling**:
Cowboy uses a single-threaded asynchronous model, while Puma and Passenger are multi-threaded. Cowboy relies on the Erlang VM for concurrency while Puma utilizes multiple threads within a process to handle incoming requests efficiently. Passenger, on the other hand, can spawn multiple processes to handle requests simultaneously.

2. **Configuration Flexibility**:
Passenger provides a user-friendly configuration interface with multiple options for customization, making it easy for developers to adjust settings according to their needs. Puma offers a more streamlined configuration process, ideal for developers looking for simplicity without sacrificing performance. Cowboy, being a low-level framework, requires more manual configuration and customization, suitable for advanced users.

3. **Community Support**:
Passenger has a large community of active users and contributors, resulting in frequent updates, bug fixes, and support. Puma also has a supportive community, but with a focus on performance tuning and optimizations. Cowboy, although reliable, has a smaller community compared to the other two frameworks, which may impact the availability of resources and assistance.

4. **Scalability**:
Puma is known for its superior scalability due to its multi-process/multi-threaded architecture, making it a popular choice for high-traffic applications. Passenger, with its process-spawning capabilities, offers good scalability as well. Cowboy, while highly performant and efficient, may not scale as easily in certain scenarios due to its design limitations.

5. **Integration with Web Servers**:
Passenger integrates directly with popular web servers like Apache and Nginx, offering seamless deployment options for developers. Puma, although capable of running as a standalone HTTP server, can also be integrated with web servers for added flexibility. Cowboy, being a standalone HTTP server, may require additional setup and configuration to work alongside web servers.

6. **Memory Footprint**:
Puma and Passenger tend to have a higher memory footprint compared to Cowboy, which can impact resource usage in memory-constrained environments. Cowboy, optimized for low memory consumption, may be preferable for applications where memory efficiency is a critical factor.

In Summary, Cowboy, Passenger, and Puma differ in concurrency handling, configuration flexibility, community support, scalability, integration with web servers, and memory footprint, offering developers a range of options based on their specific needs.

Cowboy vs Passenger vs Puma

Overview