Managed Web Application Firewall, part of Alert Logic Enterprise vs NGINX

Likelihood to Recommend

Great at web-based attack protection.
Easy to add sites within a few minutes once familiar with the interface and process.

IT Security Infrastructure Coordinator

Northside HospitalHospital & Health Care, 10,001+ employees

Nginx is well suited for serving any static content - whether that be images, JS files, HTML files, CSS files, videos, etc. If you have a high-traffic website, Nginx will be a great fit because it handles large number of requests extremely efficiently. Nginx has full support on Unix systems, but only has limited support on Microsoft Windows machines.

Read full review

Gabriel Samaroo

Senior Software Engineer

RocketripComputer Software, 11-50 employees

View all 25 answers on this topic

Pros

Web-based attack protection
Site monitoring
Notification and alerting from the vendor

Read full review

Brian Hoadley

IT Security Infrastructure Coordinator

Northside HospitalHospital & Health Care, 10,001+ employees

View all 1 answers on this topic

Straight-forward configuration format that users of all skill levels can learn, and yet is powerful enough for the huge breadth of features that Nginx provides.
Massive scale right out the box. We've never had a Nginx instance overwhelmed by requests, and if we did it would be trivial to spin up more Nginx instances to handle the load.
SSL termination means that we can deliver content over HTTPS without needing our individual services to require TLS support. This saves us a lot of time and headache while keeping us secure.
Nginx is open-source and free, meaning that anyone can use it to power their services, from individual projects to billion-dollar websites.

Read full review

Tyler Johnson

Senior Software Architect

Beneath The InkComputer Software, 1-10 employees

View all 25 answers on this topic

Cons

Initial professional services engagement for setup/implementation
Vendor change management without notification

Read full review

Brian Hoadley

IT Security Infrastructure Coordinator

Northside HospitalHospital & Health Care, 10,001+ employees

View all 1 answers on this topic

Customer support can be strangely condescending, perhaps it's a language issue?
I find it a little weird how the release versions used for Nginx+ aren't the same as for open source version. It can be very confusing to determine the cross-compatibility of modules, etc., because of this.
It seems like some (most?) modules on their own site are ancient and no longer supported, so their documentation in this area needs work.
It's difficult to navigate between nginx.com commercial site and customer support. They need to be integrated together.
I'd love to see more work done on nginx+ monitoring without requiring logging every request. I understand that many statistics can only be derived from logs, but plenty should work without that. Logging is not an option in many environments.

Read full review

L Matthew Blancett

Senior DevOps Engineer

Conversant Inc. (formerly Dotomi)Marketing and Advertising, 5001-10,000 employees

View all 25 answers on this topic

Usability

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

NGINX 9.0

Based on 1 answer

Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application. Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective. Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.

Read full review

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 10,001+ employees

View all 1 answers on this topic

Support Rating

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

NGINX 7.8

Based on 10 answers

I'm explicitly rating the open-source version of NGINX here. The open-source version has good documentation and useful examples. As one of the most web servers in the world, there is a wide range of tutorials and examples to learn from. This does have the drawback of potentially using older documentation, but NGINX has excellent default behavior, and the official documentation is easy to use. Their paid support seems excellent as well, though we haven't taken advantage of it yet.

Read full review

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Human Resources Company, 51-200 employees

View all 10 answers on this topic

Alternatives Considered

No answers on this topic

Nginx struck the right balance for us of raw speed, power, convenience, and simplicity.

I don't like the idea of hosting all of our open source PHP-based websites on Microsoft Windows servers with IIS, so that option was out first.
Next, we had experience with Apache already, and were initially considering sticking with that, however it was decided that it would take too much administration time to properly configure and tune the server, especially considering it would need to occur on an ongoing basis.
I've personally had experience with Litespeed Web Server, but we wanted something a little bit lower level--we don't need to actually manage our virtual hosts within an admin UI, and we wanted to stick with open source as much as possible. One huge benefit of Litespeed, however, is that it's .htaccess-compatible, meaning it's a much smaller transition from Apache in some cases.
LightTPD was the closest contender to Nginx when all was said and done. We chose Nginx because some of us were more familiar with it or had some experience with it, and Nginx seemed to have more documentation and resources online for finding assistance at the time.

Read full review

Ben McClure

Head of Development Technologies

Top Floor TechnologiesInternet, 11-50 employees

View all 25 answers on this topic

Return on Investment

Filled a critical business need to protect home grown websites.
Integrated well with SIEM.

Read full review

Brian Hoadley

IT Security Infrastructure Coordinator

Northside HospitalHospital & Health Care, 10,001+ employees

View all 1 answers on this topic

Improved the reliability of our site. Before using Nginx, with Apache as our app server, there were times when we had to manually go in and restart Apache to bring the site back online. We've never had to do that with Nginx.
Made our web server more memory efficient -- Nginx has a very small memory footprint, on the order of under 100 MB. This makes it suitable even for cheap VPS machines.
The Nginx community provides online examples of configurations, so it saves us time in writing the config files from scratch.

Read full review

Anand Chhatpar

CTO

Growth Champ, a service by Fame Express LLCInternet, 1-10 employees

View all 25 answers on this topic

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Managed Web Application Firewall, part of Alert Logic Enterprise Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

—

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

Optional

NGINX Editions & Modules

Edition

NGINX Plus	Contact sales team¹
NGINX Controller	Contact sales team
NGINX App Protect	Contact sales team
NGINX Amplify	Contact sales team

per instance/enterprise pricing available

Additional Pricing Details

—

Managed Web Application Firewall, part of Alert Logic Enterprise vs NGINX