Overview

NGINX

Stacks10

Followers61.9K

Votes5.5K

GitHub Stars28.4K

Forks7.6K

NGINX Unit

Stacks87

Followers199

Votes11

GitHub Stars5.6K

Forks365

NGINX Unit vs nginx: What are the differences?

NGINX Unit and Nginx are both popular web servers with similar capabilities but have some key differences that set them apart. Here are the main differences between them:

Architecture: NGINX Unit is designed with a modular architecture that allows for dynamic customization. It supports multiple programming languages and can be easily extended and customized. On the other hand, Nginx has a monolithic architecture optimized for high performance and stability.
Deployment: NGINX Unit can be deployed as a standalone application server, running independently of a web server. It can handle both static and dynamic content. In contrast, Nginx is primarily used as a reverse proxy server or a load balancer to distribute incoming requests to backend servers.
Flexibility: NGINX Unit provides more flexibility in terms of application capabilities and configuration management. It allows developers to run multiple applications simultaneously, each with its own configuration and runtime environment. Nginx is known for its simplicity and ease of use, but it has less flexibility compared to NGINX Unit.
Dynamic Everything: NGINX Unit supports dynamic configuration updates without requiring a server restart, making it ideal for scenarios that require frequent configuration changes. It also allows dynamic updates of SSL certificates, routing rules, and process isolation. Nginx, while highly performant, requires a reload or restart to apply any configuration changes.
Programming Languages: NGINX Unit supports a wide range of programming languages such as PHP, Python, Ruby, Go, and more. It integrates with application servers and frameworks for seamless development and deployment. Nginx, on the other hand, has limited support for programming languages and mainly focuses on serving static content efficiently.
Community and Ecosystem: Nginx has a well-established and vibrant community with extensive documentation, plugins, and modules readily available. It has been around for a longer time and is widely supported by the open-source community. NGINX Unit, being relatively new, has a smaller community and ecosystem, but it is quickly growing, and more features, modules, and integrations are being added.

In summary, NGINX Unit offers a more flexible and dynamic application server solution with support for multiple programming languages. Nginx, on the other hand, excels as a reverse proxy and load balancer, with a strong community and extensive ecosystem.

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Advice on NGINX, NGINX Unit

greg00m

Mar 9, 2020

Needs advice

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!

766k views766k

Comments

Grant

Developer at GMS LLC

Sep 5, 2020

Decided

Server rendered HTML output from PHP is being migrated to the client as Vue.js components, future plans to provide additional content, and other new miscellaneous features all result in a substantial increase of static files needing to be served from the server. NGINX has better performance than Apache for serving static content.
The change to NGINX will require switching from PHP to PHP-FPM resulting in a distributed architecture with a higher complexity configuration, but this is outweighed by PHP-FPM being faster than PHP for processing requests.
The NGINX + PHP-FPM setup now allows for horizontally scaling of resources rather vertically scaling the previously combined Apache + PHP resources.
PHP shell tasks can now efficiently be decoupled from the application reducing main application footprint and allow for scaling of tasks on an individual basis.

429k views429k

Comments

jlp78

May 31, 2019

Reviewon

NGINX

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.

727k views727k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

NGINX	NGINX Unit
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.	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 28.4K	GitHub Stars 5.6K
GitHub Forks 7.6K	GitHub Forks 365
Stacks 10	Stacks 87
Followers 61.9K	Followers 199
Votes 5.5K	Votes 11
Pros & Cons
Pros 1453 High-performance http server 895 Performance 730 Easy to configure 607 Open source 530 Load balancer Cons 10 Advanced features require subscription	Pros 3 PHP 2 Multilang 2 Python 2 Golang 1 Ruby
Integrations
No integrations available	Perl Python Golang PHP Ruby

What are some alternatives to NGINX, NGINX Unit?

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.

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.

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.

Puma

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.