Web Servers

Caddy75.9k★

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.

Nginx31.7k★

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.

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.