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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Infrastructure as a Service
  4. Load Balancer Reverse Proxy
  5. HAProxy vs NGINX Unit

HAProxy vs NGINX Unit

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

HAProxy
HAProxy
Stacks2.6K
Followers2.1K
Votes564
NGINX Unit
NGINX Unit
Stacks86
Followers199
Votes11
GitHub Stars5.6K
Forks365

HAProxy vs NGINX Unit: 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 Unit is detailed as "A dynamic web and application server with Go, PHP, Python, Perl, and Ruby support". NGINX Unit is a dynamic web application server, designed to run applications in multiple languages. Unit is lightweight, polyglot, and dynamically configured via API. The design of the server allows reconfiguration of specific application parameters as needed by the engineering or operations.

HAProxy can be classified as a tool in the "Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy" category, while NGINX Unit is grouped under "Web Servers".

NGINX Unit is an open source tool with 1.98K GitHub stars and 141 GitHub forks. Here's a link to NGINX Unit's open source repository on GitHub.

Instagram, Dropbox, and Medium are some of the popular companies that use HAProxy, whereas NGINX Unit is used by inFeedo, Put.io, and Centra. HAProxy has a broader approval, being mentioned in 457 company stacks & 213 developers stacks; compared to NGINX Unit, which is listed in 11 company stacks and 8 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

HAProxy
HAProxy
NGINX Unit
NGINX Unit

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.

NGINX Unit is a dynamic web application server, designed to run applications in multiple languages. Unit is lightweight, polyglot, and dynamically configured via API. The design of the server allows reconfiguration of specific application parameters as needed by the engineering or operations.

-
Fully dynamic reconfiguration using RESTful JSON API;Multiple application languages and versions can run simultaneously;Dynamic application processes management (coming soon);TLS support (coming soon);TCP, HTTP, HTTPS, HTTP/2 routing and proxying (coming soon)
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
5.6K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
365
Stacks
2.6K
Stacks
86
Followers
2.1K
Followers
199
Votes
564
Votes
11
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 134
    Load balancer
  • 102
    High performance
  • 69
    Very fast
  • 58
    Proxying for tcp and http
  • 55
    SSL termination
Cons
  • 6
    Becomes your single point of failure
Pros
  • 3
    PHP
  • 2
    Python
  • 2
    Multilang
  • 2
    Golang
  • 1
    Node.js
Integrations
No integrations available
Perl
Perl
Python
Python
Golang
Golang
PHP
PHP
Ruby
Ruby

What are some alternatives to HAProxy, NGINX Unit?

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.

Unicorn

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

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.

Traefik

Traefik

A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.

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.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

With Elastic Load Balancing, you can add and remove EC2 instances as your needs change without disrupting the overall flow of information. If one EC2 instance fails, Elastic Load Balancing automatically reroutes the traffic to the remaining running EC2 instances. If the failed EC2 instance is restored, Elastic Load Balancing restores the traffic to that instance. Elastic Load Balancing offers clients a single point of contact, and it can also serve as the first line of defense against attacks on your network. You can offload the work of encryption and decryption to Elastic Load Balancing, so your servers can focus on their main task.

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.

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