Amazon Elastic Load Balancing vs. NGINX

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Elastic Load Balancing
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Amazon's Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple targets, such as Amazon EC2 instances, containers, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It can handle the varying load of your application traffic in a single Availability Zone or across multiple Availability Zones. Elastic Load Balancing offers three types of load balancers with the vendor states all feature the high availability, automatic scaling, and robust security necessary to make…
$0.01
Partial Hour
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…N/A
Pricing
Amazon Elastic Load BalancingNGINX
Editions & Modules
Gateway
$0.0125
Partial Hour
Application
$0.0225
Partial Hour
Network
$0.025
Partial Hour
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Elastic Load BalancingNGINX
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Elastic Load BalancingNGINX
Considered Both Products
Elastic Load Balancing
Chose Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
We have not used any other solution out there in the market but our dev-ops team did deep research and AWS provided us the solution we needed to be cost-effective. Also, the decision to keep working with Amazon was strategic. We were already using other AWS features and [Amazon …
NGINX
Chose NGINX
The support and ability to provide near zero downtime for changes is a winner. The lightweight engine also helps reduce cost.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon Elastic Load BalancingNGINX
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
-
Ratings
NGINX
8.2
21 Ratings
3% above category average
IDE support00 Ratings7.310 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings8.018 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings8.118 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings8.718 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings9.418 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings8.016 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon Elastic Load BalancingNGINX
Small Businesses
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 8.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
Score 8.9 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Elastic Load BalancingNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(4 ratings)
8.8
(48 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(1 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(1 ratings)
8.1
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Elastic Load BalancingNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
We use Amazon Elastic Load Balancers to serve mobile applications and websites. It works really well. We have not had any problems until now. Last year we integrated the AWS ELB with the EC2 Auto Scaling and now we have a fully working elastic solution. We increase/decrease EC2s instances based on traffic over our load balancers.
Read full review
F5
[NGINX] is very well suited for high performance. I have seen it used on servers with 1k current connections with no issues. Despite seeing it used in many environments I've never seen software developers use it over apache, express, IIS in local dev environments so it may be more difficult to setup. I've also seen it used to load balance again without issues.
Read full review
Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Most obviously it works great for routing traffic between components hosted on Amazon web services
  • The ability to dynamically spin up connections is fantastic.
  • In general the ease of use and configuration is a selling point.
Read full review
F5
  • Very low memory usage. Can handle many more connections than alternatives (like Apache HTTPD) due to low overhead. (event-based architecture).
  • Great at serving static content.
  • Scales very well. Easy to host multiple Nginx servers to promote high availability.
  • Open-Source (no cost)!
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • Occasionally we have a huge number of users using our network at once, and Amazon ELB isn't quite fast enough to scale effectively when that occurs. But this doesn't happen very often as our usage is usually quite stable
  • If we want to add another application to our learning suite, we would have to add another load balancer, which would incur additional cost
  • The setup was not easy and could really only be handled by one person on our team with the technical background to do so
Read full review
F5
  • 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
Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
F5
Great value for the product
Read full review
Usability
Amazon AWS
AWS Elastic Load Balancing has this trick. First, you need to know how it works. ELB is not the only piece here. ELB has a very close relation with AWS Target Groups. You create or select a target group every time you create a Load balancer. Target groups allow you to connect the load balancer to EC2 autoscaling groups, Lambda functions, or even a single EC2 instance. While this sounds complex, it becomes easy, once you know his tricks. Thanks to the user interface, managing a ELB is an easy task. The rules editor is really useful, although it will need a bit of improvement to some interface items
Read full review
F5
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
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
AWS gives you several support plans. On the free plan, you basicaly need to google for help, but the good news is that AWS Elastic Load Balancing works. We has more than 15 load balancers and we never run into a problem that require support. But you mght consider a support plan if you are going to do something more complex or critical
Read full review
F5
Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
We have not used any other solution out there in the market but our dev-ops team did deep research and AWS provided us the solution we needed to be cost-effective. Also, the decision to keep working with Amazon was strategic. We were already using other AWS features and [Amazon Elastic Load Balancing] integrates great with those.
Read full review
F5
We have used Traffic, Apache, Google Cloud Load Balancing and other managed cloud-based load balancers. When it comes to scale and customization nothing beats Nginx. We selected Nginx over the others because
  • we have a large number of services and we can manage a single Nginx instance for all of them
  • we have high impact services and Nginx never breaks a sweat under load
  • individual services have special considerations and Nginx lets us configure each one uniquely
Read full review
Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • Currently it is too soon to say for sure what kind of impact this will have.
  • The ideal goal is that this will be cheaper than having to host our own routing on site.
Read full review
F5
  • Nginx has decreased the burden of web server administration and maintenance, and we are spending less time on server issues than when we were using Apache.
  • Nginx has allowed more people in our company to get involved with configuring things on the web server, so there's no longer a single point of failure ("the Apache guy").
  • Nginx has given us the ability to handle a larger number of requests without scaling up in hardware quite so quickly.
Read full review
ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application PlatformScreenshot of NGINX Controller - MonitoringScreenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration