Apache Tomcat vs Unicorn vs nginx

Overview

NGINX

Stacks115.0K

Followers61.9K

Votes5.5K

GitHub Stars28.4K

Forks7.6K

Unicorn

Stacks479

Followers401

Votes295

GitHub Stars1.5K

Forks269

Apache Tomcat

Stacks16.9K

Followers12.6K

Votes201

GitHub Stars8.0K

Forks5.3K

Apache Tomcat vs Unicorn vs nginx: What are the differences?

# Apache Tomcat vs Unicorn and Nginx: Key Differences

Apache Tomcat, Unicorn, and Nginx are popular web servers and application servers used in web development. Understanding their key differences can help developers choose the right tool for their projects.

1. **Architecture**: Apache Tomcat is a Java-based application server primarily used to host Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSP), while Unicorn is a Ruby web server that supports Rack applications. Nginx, on the other hand, is a lightweight web server known for its high performance and scalability.

2. **Support for Languages**: Apache Tomcat is specialized for Java-based applications, while Unicorn is tailored for Ruby applications. Nginx, however, supports a wider range of programming languages and can be used as a reverse proxy server for various applications.

3. **Resource Usage**: Apache Tomcat tends to consume more system resources due to its Java-based architecture, while Unicorn and Nginx are known for their efficiency and low resource consumption. This makes Unicorn and Nginx ideal choices for high-traffic websites or applications.

4. **Load Balancing**: Nginx is well-known for its advanced load balancing capabilities, making it a preferred choice for distributing incoming traffic across multiple servers. Apache Tomcat and Unicorn also support load balancing, but Nginx offers more sophisticated features in this area.

5. **Configuration**: Apache Tomcat has a more complex configuration process compared to Unicorn and Nginx, which have simpler and more intuitive configuration settings. Nginx, in particular, has a reputation for its easy configuration syntax and flexibility in setting up server blocks.

6. **Community and Support**: Apache Tomcat has a large and active community support due to its popularity among Java developers. Unicorn and Nginx also have dedicated communities, but Apache Tomcat stands out for its extensive documentation and resources available online.

In Summary, Apache Tomcat, Unicorn, and Nginx differ in terms of architecture, language support, resource usage, load balancing capabilities, configuration complexity, and community support, making them suitable for different types of web development projects.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

NGINX	Unicorn	Apache Tomcat
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.	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.	Apache Tomcat powers numerous large-scale, mission-critical web applications across a diverse range of industries and organizations.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 28.4K	GitHub Stars 1.5K	GitHub Stars 8.0K
GitHub Forks 7.6K	GitHub Forks 269	GitHub Forks 5.3K
Stacks 115.0K	Stacks 479	Stacks 16.9K
Followers 61.9K	Followers 401	Followers 12.6K
Votes 5.5K	Votes 295	Votes 201
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 81 Fast 59 Performance 36 Web server 30 Open Source 30 Very light Cons 4 Not multithreaded	Pros 79 Easy 72 Java 49 Popular 1 Spring web Cons 3 Blocking - each http request block a thread 2 Easy to set up

What are some alternatives to NGINX, Unicorn, Apache Tomcat?

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.

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.

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.

Caddy

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

Cowboy

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.

Related Comparisons

Apache Tomcat vs Unicorn vs nginx: What are the differences?

# Apache Tomcat vs Unicorn and Nginx: Key Differences

Apache Tomcat, Unicorn, and Nginx are popular web servers and application servers used in web development. Understanding their key differences can help developers choose the right tool for their projects.

1. **Architecture**: Apache Tomcat is a Java-based application server primarily used to host Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSP), while Unicorn is a Ruby web server that supports Rack applications. Nginx, on the other hand, is a lightweight web server known for its high performance and scalability.

2. **Support for Languages**: Apache Tomcat is specialized for Java-based applications, while Unicorn is tailored for Ruby applications. Nginx, however, supports a wider range of programming languages and can be used as a reverse proxy server for various applications.

3. **Resource Usage**: Apache Tomcat tends to consume more system resources due to its Java-based architecture, while Unicorn and Nginx are known for their efficiency and low resource consumption. This makes Unicorn and Nginx ideal choices for high-traffic websites or applications.

4. **Load Balancing**: Nginx is well-known for its advanced load balancing capabilities, making it a preferred choice for distributing incoming traffic across multiple servers. Apache Tomcat and Unicorn also support load balancing, but Nginx offers more sophisticated features in this area.

5. **Configuration**: Apache Tomcat has a more complex configuration process compared to Unicorn and Nginx, which have simpler and more intuitive configuration settings. Nginx, in particular, has a reputation for its easy configuration syntax and flexibility in setting up server blocks.

6. **Community and Support**: Apache Tomcat has a large and active community support due to its popularity among Java developers. Unicorn and Nginx also have dedicated communities, but Apache Tomcat stands out for its extensive documentation and resources available online.

In Summary, Apache Tomcat, Unicorn, and Nginx differ in terms of architecture, language support, resource usage, load balancing capabilities, configuration complexity, and community support, making them suitable for different types of web development projects.

Apache Tomcat vs Unicorn vs nginx

Overview