NGINX vs. Payara Server

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
NGINX
Score 9.0 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
Payara Server
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Payara Server is a fully supported, developer-friendly, open source application server. The vendor says Payara Server’s architecture is innovative, cloud-native and optimized for production deployments. The application server is built and supported by a team of DevOps engineers dedicated to the continued development and maintenance of the open source software and committed to optimizing Payara Server for production Java EE applications. Key features of Payara Server include: •…N/A
Pricing
NGINXPayara Server
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
NGINXPayara Server
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
NGINXPayara Server
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
NGINX
8.2
21 Ratings
3% above category average
Payara Server
7.5
2 Ratings
6% below category average
IDE support7.310 Ratings6.02 Ratings
Security management8.018 Ratings7.02 Ratings
Administration and management8.118 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Application server performance8.718 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Installation9.418 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance8.016 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Best Alternatives
NGINXPayara Server
Small Businesses
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 8.2 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.8 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 8.8 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
NGINXPayara Server
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(48 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
NGINXPayara Server
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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Payara Services
- If the application is very large then the Payara server is suitable and in the case of a small application, we can choose Micro Payara. - Micro payara is very well suited for microservice architecture. - Fully Jakarta compliance. - Very good performance.
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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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Payara Services
  • Small memory footprint.
  • Fully JEE compliant with an exceptional administration console.
  • Very good performance.
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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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Payara Services
  • Issues that are logged in Payara GitHub forum need to address on time, but it keeps on postponing fixing those issues.
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Likelihood to Renew
F5
Great value for the product
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Payara Services
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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Payara Services
As mentioned before it has an amazing configuration console. You can practically do anything from there and even update the program or install new features on the fly.
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Performance
F5
No answers on this topic
Payara Services
As mentioned before, its performance capabilities were one of the reasons we used them. It interacts with mass mail software and we see no performance impact. It handles everything pretty well and pretty fast.
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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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Payara Services
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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Payara Services
- As I said before, Payara has full Jakarta compliance and provide up-to-date technology stack upgrade. - Easy to install and upgrade. - Very less configuration setting. - Default ready-to-use production domain is available, which can be spun up to use in production.
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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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Payara Services
  • Can host multiple application on single VM.
  • Helps managed service team reduces their time on installation and up-gradation ( upgrading it to a new Payara server is very simple).
  • We can opt for Payara or Micro Payara based on the application size.
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ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

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

Payara Server Screenshots

Screenshot of