Gunicorn vs lighttpd: What are the differences?

What is Gunicorn? A Python WSGI HTTP Server for UNIX. 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.

What is lighttpd? A secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web-server that has been optimized for high-performance environments. 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.

Gunicorn and lighttpd belong to "Web Servers" category of the tech stack.

"Python" is the primary reason why developers consider Gunicorn over the competitors, whereas "Lightweight" was stated as the key factor in picking lighttpd.

Gunicorn is an open source tool with 5.96K GitHub stars and 1.12K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Gunicorn's open source repository on GitHub.

Instagram, Fitocracy, and Kippt are some of the popular companies that use Gunicorn, whereas lighttpd is used by WhatsApp, Frame, and Fusionbox. Gunicorn has a broader approval, being mentioned in 184 company stacks & 51 developers stacks; compared to lighttpd, which is listed in 15 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.