NGINX vs. NGINX Ingress Controller

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
NGINX
Score 9.1 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 7.9 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
NGINXNGINX Ingress Controller
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
NGINXNGINX Ingress Controller
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
NGINXNGINX Ingress Controller
Top Pros

No answers on this topic

Top Cons

No answers on this topic

Features
NGINXNGINX Ingress Controller
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
NGINX
8.2
21 Ratings
3% above category average
NGINX Ingress Controller
-
Ratings
IDE support7.310 Ratings00 Ratings
Security management8.018 Ratings00 Ratings
Administration and management8.018 Ratings00 Ratings
Application server performance8.618 Ratings00 Ratings
Installation9.418 Ratings00 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance7.916 Ratings00 Ratings
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
NGINX
-
Ratings
NGINX Ingress Controller
7.8
2 Ratings
1% below category average
Security and Isolation00 Ratings7.52 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization00 Ratings7.52 Ratings
Discovery Tools00 Ratings8.21 Ratings
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks00 Ratings7.52 Ratings
Self-Healing and Recovery00 Ratings7.92 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging00 Ratings7.92 Ratings
Best Alternatives
NGINXNGINX Ingress Controller
Small Businesses
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 8.2 out of 10
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.8 out of 10
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.8 out of 10
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
NGINXNGINX Ingress Controller
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(48 ratings)
7.9
(2 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
NGINXNGINX Ingress Controller
Likelihood to Recommend
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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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
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
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
F5
Great value for the product
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F5
No answers on this topic
Usability
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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F5
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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
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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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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Return on Investment
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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F5
  • Security is one of the best objective which we achieve with NGINX Ingress
  • Cost optimization is one of the business objective
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ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

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