Azure App Service vs. NGINX

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure App Service
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
The Microsoft Azure App Service is a PaaS that enables users to build, deploy, and scale web apps and APIs, a fully managed service with built-in infrastructure maintenance, security patching, and scaling. Includes Azure Web Apps, Azure Mobile Apps, Azure API Apps, allowing developers to use popular frameworks including .NET, .NET Core, Java, Node.js, Python, PHP, and Ruby.
$9.49
per month
NGINX
Score 9.2 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
Azure App ServiceNGINX
Editions & Modules
Shared Environment for dev/test
$9.49
per month
Basic Dedicated environment for dev/test
$54.75
per month
Standard Run production workloads
$73
per month
Premium Enhanced performance and scale
$146
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure App ServiceNGINX
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional DetailsFree and Shared (preview) plans are ideal for testing applications in a managed Azure environment. Basic, Standard and Premium plans are for production workloads and run on dedicated Virtual Machine instances. Each instance can support multiple applications and domains.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure App ServiceNGINX
Considered Both Products
Azure App Service

No answer on this topic

NGINX
Chose NGINX
MS IIS and Apache HTTP Server both provide many similar services. However the configuration simplicity, and performance characteristics helped us choose NGINX above the other 2 products.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Azure App ServiceNGINX
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Azure App Service
8.1
4 Ratings
1% above category average
NGINX
-
Ratings
Ease of building user interfaces9.84 Ratings00 Ratings
Scalability9.94 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform management overhead4.54 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow engine capability5.33 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform access control9.94 Ratings00 Ratings
Services-enabled integration9.94 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment creation9.94 Ratings00 Ratings
Development environment replication10.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification8.04 Ratings00 Ratings
Issue recovery6.24 Ratings00 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes5.44 Ratings00 Ratings
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Azure App Service
-
Ratings
NGINX
7.9
22 Ratings
2% below category average
IDE support00 Ratings7.111 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings7.919 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings7.219 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings8.119 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings9.719 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings7.217 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Azure App ServiceNGINX
Small Businesses
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda
Score 8.8 out of 10
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.3 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure App ServiceNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
7.6
(8 ratings)
8.9
(49 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(2 ratings)
8.1
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure App ServiceNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
You may easily deploy your apps to Azure App Service if they were written in Visual Studio IDE (typically.NET applications). With a few clicks of the mouse, you may already deploy your application to a remote server using the Visual Studio IDE. As a result of the portal's bulk and complexity, I propose Heroku for less-experienced developers.
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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.
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Pros
Microsoft
  • It has options to deploy using CI/CD.
  • It has great integration with Azure Devops
  • It has all the common runtimes, so we don't need to install softwares.
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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)!
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Cons
Microsoft
  • the learning curve can be tough (just like other azure services)
  • the UX/UI could be more intuitive (just like other azure services as well)
  • monitoring can be hard to understand
  • Microsoft's learning resources are hard to understand
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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.
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Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
F5
Great value for the product
Read full review
Usability
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
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.
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Support Rating
Microsoft
We had an issue where we deployed too large of a resource and didn't notice until the bill came through. They were very understanding and saw we weren't utilizing the resources so they issued a generous refund in about 4 hours. Very fast, friendly, and understanding support reps from my experience.
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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.
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
Azure has many data center, their services are more reliable. Azure has way more features than both Linode and DigitalOcean. If someone wants a complete reliable service, he/she must go to Azure instead of Linode and DigitalOcean because even though azure charges more, it is worth the money you pay there.
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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
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Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • Reduced the deployment time of ASP .NET applications in the company.
  • Gave us an alternative to quickly deploy our applications without granting access to the version control system to a third platform.
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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.
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ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

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