Docker vs. NGINX vs. NGINX Ingress Controller

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Docker
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Docker Enterprise was sold to Mirantis in 2019; that product is now sold as Mirantis Kubernetes Engine. But Docker now offers a 2-product suite that includes Docker Desktop, which they present as a fast way to containerize applications on a desktop; and, Docker Hub, a service for finding and sharing container images with a team and the Docker community, a repository of container images with an array of…
$5
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
NGINX Ingress Controller
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
NGINX Ingress Controller is a traffic management solution for cloud‑native apps in Kubernetes and containerized environments.N/A
Pricing
DockerNGINXNGINX Ingress Controller
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
unlimited public repositories
Pro
$5.00
per month per user
Team
$7.00
per month per user
Business
$21
per month per user
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DockerNGINXNGINX Ingress Controller
Free Trial
NoYesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptionalOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DockerNGINXNGINX Ingress Controller
Features
DockerNGINXNGINX Ingress Controller
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
Docker
-
Ratings
NGINX
8.7
32 Ratings
9% above category average
NGINX Ingress Controller
-
Ratings
IDE support00 Ratings7.617 Ratings00 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings8.627 Ratings00 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings8.827 Ratings00 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings9.327 Ratings00 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings8.929 Ratings00 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings9.025 Ratings00 Ratings
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
Docker
-
Ratings
NGINX
-
Ratings
NGINX Ingress Controller
7.8
2 Ratings
4% below category average
Security and Isolation00 Ratings00 Ratings7.52 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization00 Ratings00 Ratings7.52 Ratings
Discovery Tools00 Ratings00 Ratings8.21 Ratings
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks00 Ratings00 Ratings7.52 Ratings
Self-Healing and Recovery00 Ratings00 Ratings7.92 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging00 Ratings00 Ratings7.92 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DockerNGINXNGINX Ingress Controller
Small Businesses
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 9.1 out of 10
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Git
Git
Score 10.0 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DockerNGINXNGINX Ingress Controller
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(14 ratings)
8.9
(50 ratings)
7.9
(2 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(1 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(2 ratings)
8.3
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DockerNGINXNGINX Ingress Controller
Likelihood to Recommend
Docker
You are going to be able to find the most resources and examples using Docker whenever you are working with a container orchestration software like Kubernetes. There will always some entropy when you run in a container, a containerized application will never be as purely performant as an app running directly on the OS. However, in most scenarios this loss will be negligible to the time saved in deployment, monitoring, etc.
Read full review
F5
Nginx is well-suited for any web server scenarios, such as web applications, backend or reverse proxy for both application and HTTP requests, and distribution. It is less appropriate for Windows-based applications that run directly on a Windows Server host. In any case, it is very easy to manage, through separate conf files for each application or site you want to host with it.
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F5
Best suited if we have to manage external traffic inside your Kubernetes cluster and want to use granular control to your applications.
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Pros
Docker
  • Packaging of application to limit the space occupied
  • Ease of running the application
  • Provide multiple ways to handle the application issues and integration of different components like pipeline, ansible, terraform etc
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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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F5
  • Provide access to containers
  • Manage traffic
  • Route traffic
  • Lightweight
  • Near to zero downtime
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Cons
Docker
  • Docker hub image retention policy can be relaxed
  • Docker hub policies can be more developer friendly
  • Docker CLI help section can be improved
  • Image and container storage (local) management can be optimized
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.
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F5
  • Its not related to Ingress functionality but certificate management with cloud vendor would be a feature i would like to see.
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Likelihood to Renew
Docker
No answers on this topic
F5
Great value for the product
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F5
No answers on this topic
Usability
Docker
I have been using Docker for more than 3 years and it really simplifies the modern application development and deployment. I like the ability of Docker to improve efficiency, portability and scalability for developers and operations teams. Another reason for giving this rating is because Docker integrates CI/CD pipelines very well
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F5
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
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F5
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
Docker
Haven't seen any outages, fatal/unrecoverable errors in my usage so far. Enough said.
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F5
No answers on this topic
F5
No answers on this topic
Performance
Docker
Docker Desktop. The CPU high usage is a known issue. Needs fixing. Otherwise, it is great overall. Would not use anything else still.
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F5
No answers on this topic
F5
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Docker
No answers on this topic
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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F5
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Docker
The reason why we are still using Docker right now is due to that is the best among its peers and suits our needs the best. However, the trend we foresee for the future might indicate Amazon lambda could potentially fit our needs to code enviornmentless in the near future.
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F5
I have found that [NGINX] seems to perform better throughout the years with less issues although I've used Apache more. I would definitely recommend [NGINX] for any high volume site and I've seen this to usually be the case from most provided web hosts who will pick [NGINX] over alternatives
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F5
We are already using NGINX which is so reliable, it definitely lends weight to our decision to select NGINX Ingress Controller. Also, even though it is a little more complex to manage, NGINX Ingress Controller definitely have a richer feature set, better performance, caching, traffic management among other features which was why it was chosen.
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Scalability
Docker
It is the only tool in our toolset that has not [had] any issues so far. That is really a mark of reliability, and it's a testimony to how well the product is made, and a tool that does its job well is a tool well worth having. It is the base tool that I would say any organisation must have if they do scalable deployment.
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F5
No answers on this topic
F5
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Docker
  • Reduces the number of virtual machine which impacted our quarterly billing
  • Using docker with proxy we run multiple application on same port on same host.
  • impact on billing is we have to provide docker training to the people who are working on it.
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F5
  • By using Nginx, we can host multiple web services on a single server, keeping our infrastructure costs lower.
  • Nginx maintains our HTTPS connections, allowing us to keep our promise to our customers that their data is safe in transit.
  • Due to Nginx's extremely low failure rate, our web addresses always return something meaningful, even when individual services go down. In sense, this means we are "always online" and allows us to maintain brand and support our customers even in the face of catastrophe.
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F5
  • Security is one of the best objective which we achieve with NGINX Ingress
  • Cost optimization is one of the business objective
Read full review
ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

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