Web Servers

Caddy78.8k★

Caddy is the web server that handles HTTPS for you. Point a domain at it and it gets and renews TLS certificates on its own, for public sites, localhost and internal IPs alike. It doubles as a reverse proxy, the job most people hand to NGINX or Traefik. Apache 2.0, written in Go, and every feature is free. Setup is one dependency-free binary and a Caddyfile that is often a handful of lines. Automation gets a JSON config with a live REST API. On-Demand TLS issues certificates during the handshake, which is why white-label SaaS products use it for customer domains. Version 2.11 is current and releases keep coming. There is no paid edition and no hosted Caddy. Money comes from sponsorships run by Dyanim, LLC, original author Matt Holt's company: $25/month for individuals up to $11,900/month for Enterprise+, buying support and priority, not features. Solo and small teams: free. Larger teams in production: still free, but a sponsorship is the only way to get the maintainers on a call. The catch: plugins are compiled in, not loaded. Wildcard certificates need a DNS provider module, and any third-party module means a custom build with xcaddy, redone on every upgrade.

Nginx32.1k★

Nginx sits in front of your apps and handles the traffic: it serves files, forwards requests to your backend, spreads load across servers and caches responses. It runs roughly 30% of the websites W3Techs tracks, second only to Cloudflare's own servers. BSD licensed, free, and developed in the open on GitHub since 2024. Running it is easy; configuring it well takes practice. Install the official packages from nginx.org rather than your distro's, stay on the stable branch (1.30) unless you want mainline's newer features (1.31), and patch often, because nginx has shipped fixes for more than twenty CVEs this year. Automatic HTTPS now works through the official ACME module, but caddyserver/caddy still does it with zero config. The Windows build is a proof of concept, not a production option. Free nginx has absorbed a lot that used to be paid: sticky sessions, backend DNS re-resolution, least-time balancing on mainline and a basic control API. F5's NGINX Plus still gates active health checks, live upstream changes without a reload, JWT auth and cluster state sync. F5 publishes no price; on AWS Marketplace it's $0.50 an hour per instance, or about $4,167 a year, plus EC2. Solo and small teams: free nginx. Large teams that need those features with vendor support: Plus, or traefik/traefik. The catch: the config language is powerful and unforgiving, and one wrong location block can take a site down. Also don't confuse it with ingress-nginx, the Kubernetes controller, which was retired in March 2026 and no longer gets security fixes. Nginx itself is healthy.

wildfly3.2k★

WildFly is the Java application server that handles the plumbing under an enterprise app: servlets, connection pooling, transactions, messaging, security, clustering. Version 41 shipped in July 2026 with Jakarta EE 11 across the Platform, Web, and Core profiles, plus MicroProfile. Apache 2.0, free, nothing feature-gated. Running it is real work. JDK 17 or newer to build, releases every January, April, July, and October, and configuration living in standalone.xml or a managed domain once you cluster across machines. Galleon feature packs and layers let you provision only the subsystems your app uses, which is the difference between a bloated container image and a lean one. Use it when you are committed to Jakarta EE and want the whole spec, not a slice. Solo devs and small teams starting fresh: spring-projects/spring-boot or Quarkus gets you to production faster with less to configure. Medium teams carrying existing EE apps, JMS queues, and JTA transactions: WildFly is the free path and a good one. Large enterprises usually land on Red Hat's JBoss EAP for the support contract. The catch: WildFly is fast only if you trim it. Boot the full profile and you wait. Provision just the layers you need and it starts quickly. Nobody mentions that when they show you the startup benchmark.