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HAProxy vs nginx: What are the differences?
Developers describe HAProxy as "The Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer". HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. On the other hand, nginx is detailed as "A high performance free open source web server powering busiest sites on the Internet". 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.
HAProxy belongs to "Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy" category of the tech stack, while nginx can be primarily classified under "Web Servers".
"Load balancer", "High performance" and "Very fast" are the key factors why developers consider HAProxy; whereas "High-performance http server", "Performance" and "Easy to configure" are the primary reasons why nginx is favored.
nginx is an open source tool with 9K GitHub stars and 3.41K GitHub forks. Here's a link to nginx's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, nginx has a broader approval, being mentioned in 8631 company stacks & 2495 developers stacks; compared to HAProxy, which is listed in 452 company stacks and 205 developer stacks.
I am diving into web development, both front and back end. I feel comfortable with administration, scripting and moderate coding in bash, Python and C++, but I am also a Windows fan (i love inner conflict). What are the votes on web servers? IIS is expensive and restrictive (has Windows adoption of open source changed this?) Apache has the history but seems to be at the root of most of my Infosec issues, and I know nothing about nginx (is it too new to rely on?). And no, I don't know what I want to do on the web explicitly, but hosting and data storage (both cloud and tape) are possibilities. Ready, aim fire!
I would pick nginx over both IIS and Apace HTTP Server any day. Combine it with docker, and as you grow maybe even traefik, and you'll have a really flexible solution for serving http content where you can take sites and projects up and down without effort, easily move it between systems and dont have to handle any dependencies on your actual local machine.
From a StackShare Community member: "We are a LAMP shop currently focused on improving web performance for our customers. We have made many front-end optimizations and now we are considering replacing Apache with nginx. I was wondering if others saw a noticeable performance gain or any other benefits by switching."
I use nginx because it is very light weight. Where Apache tries to include everything in the web server, nginx opts to have external programs/facilities take care of that so the web server can focus on efficiently serving web pages. While this can seem inefficient, it limits the number of new bugs found in the web server, which is the element that faces the client most directly.
I use nginx because its more flexible and easy to configure
I use Apache HTTP Server because it's intuitive, comprehensive, well-documented, and just works
Pros of HAProxy
- Load balancer130
- High performance101
- Very fast69
- Proxying for tcp and http58
- SSL termination55
- Open source31
- Reliable27
- Free20
- Well-Documented18
- Very popular12
- Runs health checks on backends7
- Suited for very high traffic web sites7
- Scalable6
- Ready to Docker5
- Powers many world's most visited sites4
- Work with NTLM2
- Ssl offloading2
- Simple2
- Available as a plugin for OPNsense1
Pros of NGINX
- High-performance http server1.4K
- Performance894
- Easy to configure729
- Open source607
- Load balancer530
- Free288
- Scalability288
- Web server224
- Simplicity175
- Easy setup136
- Content caching30
- Web Accelerator21
- Capability15
- Fast14
- Predictability12
- High-latency12
- Reverse Proxy8
- The best of them7
- Supports http/27
- Enterprise version5
- Great Community5
- Lots of Modules5
- High perfomance proxy server4
- Streaming media delivery3
- Reversy Proxy3
- Streaming media3
- Embedded Lua scripting3
- GRPC-Web2
- Blash2
- Lightweight2
- Fast and easy to set up2
- Slim2
- saltstack2
- Virtual hosting1
- Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast1
- Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior1
- Ingress controller1
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Cons of HAProxy
- Becomes your single point of failure6
Cons of NGINX
- Advanced features require subscription8
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