Web Servers
2 open source tools compared. Sorted by stars. Scroll down for our analysis.
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
| Tool | Stars | Velocity | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
 Caddy Fast, multi-platform web server with automatic HTTPS | 74.7k | +220/wk | 91 |
 Nginx HTTP and reverse proxy server | 31.4k | +95/wk | 88 |
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Our Analysis
Point it at your domain, it gets the certificate and renews it. Done. Apache 2.0, written in Go. You download a single binary, write a Caddyfile that's maybe 5 lines long, and your site is live with HTTPS. Compare that to nginx where HTTPS setup is a whole afternoon project if you're new to it. Everything is free. No paid tier, no enterprise edition, no cloud offering from the Caddy team. The company behind it (ZeroSSL/Apilayer) makes money from other products, not from gating Caddy features. You self-host it. There's no managed version to pay for. The catch: Caddy uses more memory than nginx and handles fewer concurrent connections at the extreme high end. If you're serving 50K+ requests per second, nginx or HAProxy is still the move. For 99% of projects, Caddy's performance is more than enough and the automatic HTTPS alone is worth the switch. Also, the ecosystem of third-party modules is smaller than nginx's. Some niche configurations might not have a plugin yet.
There's a good chance Nginx is already sitting in front of your website or API. It's a web server and reverse proxy that handles incoming traffic: routing requests to your app, serving static files, terminating SSL, load balancing across multiple servers. It powers about a third of the internet, on the official mirror, BSD license, C-based, absurdly fast. Nginx handles tens of thousands of concurrent connections with minimal memory. If Apache is a minivan, Nginx is a sports car, less configurable out of the box, but dramatically more efficient under load. The open source version does everything most teams need: reverse proxy, load balancing, SSL termination, static file serving, basic rate limiting. Nginx Plus (the commercial version from F5) starts at ~$2,500/year and adds active health checks, session persistence, live activity monitoring, and a management API. The catch: Nginx config files are their own language. You will spend time learning the syntax, debugging location blocks, and Googling "nginx 502 bad gateway." For simpler setups, Caddy auto-configures HTTPS and has a more intuitive config. But for raw performance and flexibility, Nginx remains the default.