Apache HTTP Server vs. NGINX

Well Suited: Perfect for hosting your own website. And, I don't mean just an individual with a port of MySpace. I mean an industrial strength, commercial grade replacement for Microsoft IIS. If you need a web server that provides a feature-rich environment with support for multiple sites (hosted in the same server), with such features as virtual hosting, and modular feature design, than Apache Web Server is right on the money. Less Well-Suited: Single page, small feature-set websites. Apache is a lot of trouble for developers to set up, just to send/receive JSON strings of a few bytes. You're really better off using something smaller and faster/simpler (lighttpd for example).

Incentivized

[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.

Incentivized

• Apache is Open Source, governed well (the foundation) and probably the most stable computing platform ever.
• Apache is probably one of the most customizable and configurable pieces of software that I have ever run across in more than 30 years of development.
• If there is something that Apache can not do, then you need to ask yourself; should I be doing that? The point here is that it is a solid solution and seems to only integrate other technologies that are of the highest caliber.
• Apache will live forever and you can not go wrong with it.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Configuration files are located on different places depending on your Linux distro.
• If you have an error on one configuration file, apache refuses to start and sometimes is difficult to know why.
• Security is not great by default, but making a todo list help when you configure a new server.

Incentivized

• 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.

Great value for the product

Incentivized

This tool is really easy to use and configure. Consumes very less system resources. It is highly modular and configurable. You can easily use it with other tools like certbot for SSLs. You can configure basic security with configuration and headers

Incentivized

I give this rating because there is so much Apache documentation and information on the web that you can literally do anything. This has to do with the fact that there is a huge Open Source community that is beyond mature and perhaps one of the most helpful to be found. The only thing that should hold anyone back from anything is that they can not read. RTFM, my friend. And I must say that the manual is excellent.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The comparison with other products from IBM or Oracle is difficult. These are mostly software that has to be paid for. The only fair comparison at eye level is probably the NGINX web server: It is also free and offers even higher performance. In the meantime, there is also a paid Plus version of NGINX. This has extended support and special functions.

Incentivized

All of those are paid solutions with very good features, but they also offer dedicated scenarios for web application hosting. If you run applications on on-premises web servers and don't have a Microsoft licence agreement, Nginx is a very good and reliable option, based on Linux distributions and available as freeware.

Incentivized

• Apache web server helped us in building client applications without much investment in the underlying server configuration which gives us the ability to start on a new project quickly and upgrade its resources as and when needed.
• Using software which is well-supported by a community of open source contributors makes tasks easy and affordable when need help since a couple of minutes on Google saves a couple of dollars every time and you don't need a specialized support person unless there is something significant needing to be changed.

Incentivized

• Our websites are noticeably faster, causing an increase in customer satisfaction.
• Nginx has such a low memory/resource footprint that we save money from not needing multiple large, expensive servers.
• Ability to load balance traffic, have server-redundancy, and have high-availability allows for 100% uptime and provides cost-effective solutions to alternatives that can cost a lot.

Incentivized