Caddy

Caddy is the web server that gets HTTPS right automatically. Drop in a Caddyfile, point your domain, and it provisions and renews Let's Encrypt certificates without you touching a single TLS config. One binary, no dependencies, written in Go.

Nginx is the battle-tested standard but configuring TLS correctly is a dark art. Traefik is the container-native alternative with Docker/Kubernetes auto-discovery. Apache is still around for legacy reasons. For commercial, Cloudflare's proxy handles HTTPS for you.

If you're deploying a side project, API, or reverse proxy and don't want to think about certificates, Caddy saves you hours. The Caddyfile syntax is dramatically simpler than Nginx config. It handles HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and OCSP stapling automatically.

The catch: performance is slightly behind Nginx under extreme load — we're talking thousands of requests per second difference that most apps never hit. The module ecosystem is smaller than Nginx's. And if your team already knows Nginx cold, the migration cost may not justify the convenience.