What is Varnish and what are its top alternatives?
Top Alternatives to Varnish
- 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. ...
- Redis
Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis provides data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs, geospatial indexes, and streams. ...
- HAProxy
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. ...
- Apache Traffic Server
It is a fast, scalable and extensible HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2.0 compliant caching proxy server.Improve your response time, while reducing server load and bandwidth needs by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages, images, and web ser ...
- Squid
Squid reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator. It runs on most available operating systems, including Windows and is licensed under the GNU GPL. ...
- Section
Edge Compute Platform gives Dev and Ops engineers the access and control they need to run compute workloads on a distributed edge. ...
- Nuster
nuster is a high performance HTTP proxy cache server and RESTful NoSQL cache server based on HAProxy. ...
Varnish alternatives & related posts
NGINX
- High-performance http server1.4K
- Performance893
- Easy to configure727
- Open source606
- Load balancer529
- Free287
- Scalability287
- Web server223
- Simplicity174
- Easy setup135
- Content caching29
- Web Accelerator20
- Capability14
- Fast13
- Predictability11
- High-latency11
- Reverse Proxy7
- Supports http/26
- The best of them5
- Great Community4
- Lots of Modules4
- Enterprise version4
- High perfomance proxy server3
- Embedded Lua scripting3
- Reversy Proxy3
- Streaming media delivery3
- Streaming media3
- Fast and easy to set up2
- Slim2
- Blash2
- Lightweight2
- saltstack2
- Virtual hosting1
- Along with Redis Cache its the Most superior1
- Ingress controller1
- Narrow focus. Easy to configure. Fast1
- GRPC-Web1
- Advanced features require subscription8
related NGINX posts

















Recently I have been working on an open source stack to help people consolidate their personal health data in a single database so that AI and analytics apps can be run against it to find personalized treatments. We chose to go with a #containerized approach leveraging Docker #containers with a local development environment setup with Docker Compose and nginx for container routing. For the production environment we chose to pull code from GitHub and build/push images using Jenkins and using Kubernetes to deploy to Amazon EC2.
We also implemented a dashboard app to handle user authentication/authorization, as well as a custom SSO server that runs on Heroku which allows experts to easily visit more than one instance without having to login repeatedly. The #Backend was implemented using my favorite #Stack which consists of FeathersJS on top of Node.js and ExpressJS with PostgreSQL as the main database. The #Frontend was implemented using React, Redux.js, Semantic UI React and the FeathersJS client. Though testing was light on this project, we chose to use AVA as well as ESLint to keep the codebase clean and consistent.
We switched to Traefik so we can use the REST API to dynamically configure subdomains and have the ability to redirect between multiple servers.
We still use nginx with a docker-compose to expose the traffic from our APIs and TCP microservices, but for managing routing to the internet Traefik does a much better job
The biggest win for naologic was the ability to set dynamic configurations without having to restart the server
- Performance880
- Super fast537
- Ease of use510
- In-memory cache441
- Advanced key-value cache321
- Open source190
- Easy to deploy179
- Stable163
- Free152
- Fast120
- High-Performance40
- High Availability39
- Data Structures34
- Very Scalable32
- Replication23
- Pub/Sub20
- Great community20
- "NoSQL" key-value data store17
- Hashes14
- Sets12
- Sorted Sets10
- Lists9
- BSD licensed8
- NoSQL8
- Integrates super easy with Sidekiq for Rails background7
- Async replication7
- Bitmaps7
- Keys with a limited time-to-live6
- Open Source6
- Strings5
- Lua scripting5
- Hyperloglogs4
- Awesomeness for Free!4
- Transactions3
- Runs server side LUA3
- outstanding performance3
- Networked3
- LRU eviction of keys3
- Written in ANSI C3
- Feature Rich3
- Performance & ease of use2
- Data structure server2
- Simple1
- Channels concept1
- Scalable1
- Temporarily kept on disk1
- Dont save data if no subscribers are found1
- Automatic failover1
- Easy to use1
- Existing Laravel Integration1
- Object [key/value] size each 500 MB1
- Cannot query objects directly14
- No secondary indexes for non-numeric data types2
- No WAL1
related Redis posts
We use MongoDB as our primary #datastore. Mongo's approach to replica sets enables some fantastic patterns for operations like maintenance, backups, and #ETL.
As we pull #microservices from our #monolith, we are taking the opportunity to build them with their own datastores using PostgreSQL. We also use Redis to cache data we’d never store permanently, and to rate-limit our requests to partners’ APIs (like GitHub).
When we’re dealing with large blobs of immutable data (logs, artifacts, and test results), we store them in Amazon S3. We handle any side-effects of S3’s eventual consistency model within our own code. This ensures that we deal with user requests correctly while writes are in process.
















I'm working as one of the engineering leads in RunaHR. As our platform is a Saas, we thought It'd be good to have an API (We chose Ruby and Rails for this) and a SPA (built with React and Redux ) connected. We started the SPA with Create React App since It's pretty easy to start.
We use Jest as the testing framework and react-testing-library to test React components. In Rails we make tests using RSpec.
Our main database is PostgreSQL, but we also use MongoDB to store some type of data. We started to use Redis for cache and other time sensitive operations.
We have a couple of extra projects: One is an Employee app built with React Native and the other is an internal back office dashboard built with Next.js for the client and Python in the backend side.
Since we have different frontend apps we have found useful to have Bit to document visual components and utils in JavaScript.
- Load balancer130
- High performance100
- 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
- Becomes your single point of failure4
related HAProxy posts











Around the time of their Series A, Pinterest’s stack included Python and Django, with Tornado and Node.js as web servers. Memcached / Membase and Redis handled caching, with RabbitMQ handling queueing. Nginx, HAproxy and Varnish managed static-delivery and load-balancing, with persistent data storage handled by MySQL.
We're using Git through GitHub for public repositories and GitLab for our private repositories due to its easy to use features. Docker and Kubernetes are a must have for our highly scalable infrastructure complimented by HAProxy with Varnish in front of it. We are using a lot of npm and Visual Studio Code in our development sessions.
related Apache Traffic Server posts
- Easy to config4
- Web application accelerator2
- Cluster2
- Very Fast2
- ICP1
- High-performance1
- Very Stable1
- Open Source1
- Widely Used1
- Great community1
- ESI1
- 0
related Squid posts
- Realtime stats10
- Makes the hard parts of varnish easy10
- No more hair pulling configuring caching8
- Git support8
- Easy setup7
- Qa testing6
- Test Varnish Settings in Dev & Prod4
- Kibana logs4
- Graphite out of the box3
- Professional, rock solid platform, easy to user2
related Section posts
Nuster
- Easy to configure2
- High-performance1
- Web cache1
- Web application accelerator1
- Very Fast1
- Open Source1
- Load balancer1
- Proxying for tcp and http1
- SSL termination1
- Free1
- HTTP reverse proxy0