The Lens

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.