NGINX vs. NGINX Ingress Controller vs. NGINX Plus

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 7.5 out of 10
N/A
NGINX Ingress Controller is a traffic management solution for cloud‑native apps in Kubernetes and containerized environments.N/A
NGINX Plus
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
NGINX Plus is presented as a cloud‑native, easy-to-use reverse proxy, load balancer, and API gateway, from F5.
$849
per month billed annually
Pricing
NGINXNGINX Ingress ControllerNGINX Plus
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Team
$849
per month billed annually
Advanced
$2,099
per month billed annually
Enterprise
Tiered Pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
NGINXNGINX Ingress ControllerNGINX Plus
Free Trial
YesYesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptionalOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
NGINXNGINX Ingress ControllerNGINX Plus
Considered Multiple Products
NGINX
NGINX Ingress Controller

No answer on this topic

NGINX Plus
Chose NGINX Plus
The API and dashboard alone make NGINX Plus a better choice.
Features
NGINXNGINX Ingress ControllerNGINX Plus
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
NGINX
8.7
32 Ratings
9% above category average
NGINX Ingress Controller
-
Ratings
NGINX Plus
8.2
6 Ratings
3% above category average
IDE support7.617 Ratings00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Security management8.627 Ratings00 Ratings8.14 Ratings
Administration and management8.827 Ratings00 Ratings8.35 Ratings
Application server performance9.327 Ratings00 Ratings8.14 Ratings
Installation8.929 Ratings00 Ratings8.35 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance9.025 Ratings00 Ratings8.45 Ratings
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
NGINX
-
Ratings
NGINX Ingress Controller
7.8
2 Ratings
4% below category average
NGINX Plus
-
Ratings
Security and Isolation00 Ratings7.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization00 Ratings7.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Discovery Tools00 Ratings8.21 Ratings00 Ratings
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks00 Ratings7.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-Healing and Recovery00 Ratings7.92 Ratings00 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging00 Ratings7.92 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
NGINXNGINX Ingress ControllerNGINX Plus
Small Businesses
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 9.1 out of 10
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.0 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.0 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
NGINXNGINX Ingress ControllerNGINX Plus
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(50 ratings)
7.9
(2 ratings)
8.4
(6 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
7.4
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
NGINXNGINX Ingress ControllerNGINX Plus
Likelihood to Recommend
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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F5
Makes our life easy as application admins in securing our applications and making them accessible. We can easily add an application within a few minutes and define the backend servers right away.
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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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F5
  • APIGW
  • Policy Enforcement
  • Centrally Manage API Traffic
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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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F5
  • An AI bot would be cool to help build config files
  • More webinars for advanced NGINX Plus would be great
  • GUI tool... might already be one available
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Likelihood to Renew
F5
Great value for the product
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F5
No answers on this topic
F5
No reason not to renew it, we are happy with it.
Read full review
Usability
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
F5
Very easy to use
Read full review
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
F5
We had an issue after upgrading from RHEL 7 to 8, and there were some issues that the security team imposed upon the platform with a scanning tool. We also had a VXLAN environment that was not properly sending a gratuitous arp to the network. NGINX support was instrumental to speedily resolving our issue.
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Alternatives Considered
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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F5
The API and dashboard alone make NGINX Plus a better choice.
Read full review
Return on Investment
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
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F5
  • We are planning by using NGINX it can greatly reduce our OPEX by 50% "just our own running APIGW" the cascading effects in the long run will be much more.
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ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

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