NGINX vs. Portainer

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
Portainer
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Portainer is a centralized container management platform for containerized apps and IoT device management. It helps accelerate container adoption and reduce time-to-value on Kubernetes, Docker, and Swarm with a management portal, allowing users to deliver and manage containerized applications from the data center to the edge. Portainer helps - Reduce the operational complexity associated with multi-cluster management Bridge the skills gap and facilitate feature…
$0
Pricing
NGINXPortainer
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Portainer Business - 3 Nodes Free
$0
Home & Student
$149
per year
Starter
$995
per year
Professional
$2995
per year
Enterprise
Contact Sales for Pricing
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
NGINXPortainer
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
NGINXPortainer
Considered Both Products
NGINX

No answer on this topic

Portainer
Chose Portainer
None, as I don’t need to
Features
NGINXPortainer
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
NGINX
8.7
32 Ratings
9% above category average
Portainer
-
Ratings
IDE support7.617 Ratings00 Ratings
Security management8.627 Ratings00 Ratings
Administration and management8.827 Ratings00 Ratings
Application server performance9.327 Ratings00 Ratings
Installation8.929 Ratings00 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance9.025 Ratings00 Ratings
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
NGINX
-
Ratings
Portainer
8.4
94 Ratings
3% above category average
Security and Isolation00 Ratings8.690 Ratings
Cluster Management00 Ratings8.575 Ratings
Storage Management00 Ratings8.480 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization00 Ratings7.983 Ratings
Discovery Tools00 Ratings8.770 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging00 Ratings8.390 Ratings
Best Alternatives
NGINXPortainer
Small Businesses
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 9.1 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.8 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
Enterprises
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 alternatives
User Ratings
NGINXPortainer
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(50 ratings)
9.0
(93 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(1 ratings)
9.1
(3 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(3 ratings)
8.4
(15 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(4 ratings)
9.1
(3 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
NGINXPortainer
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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Portainer
Many developers, especially lesser experienced developers, don't have a really good background in setting up containers from the command line. Portainer is invaluable to them. Giving a UI to them gives them much more confidence and allows them to learn properties and capabilities of containers under far less stress. On the flip side of this, giving then a UI on a production system can lead to chaos...never give junior developers access to production servers.
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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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Portainer
  • Separating server maintenance with application development, providing a clear user interface for developers who don't want to worry about the underlying server.
  • RBAC for container deployment linked to a SAML IDP, not something particularly easy in a native Docker instance but point and shoot in Portainer, allowing the use of Azure / Okta etc to provide user access.
  • Image management with multiple repositories is super clear and reduces incidents
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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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Portainer
  • When setting up static IPs for a new container, having the used ones for a specific network at hand would be cool or something like a mini IPAM of some sort...
  • Using the developertools to see "oh, it's a 40x or 500" when something doesn't seem to load because the ui just states "Didn't work" is kinda annoying. expandable toasts or something would be nice.
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Likelihood to Renew
F5
Great value for the product
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Portainer
It is an excellent tool.
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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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Portainer
Accessibility for Non-Experts: even with some people having a bit longer on-boarding it is still very simple Quick setup is insanely useful, we can get it running in 10 seconds after installing docker Portainer has once again super clean UI and is very user friendly. Deployment/monitoring and management are super easy. I can tell just from a glance if something is out of date (watching at you Watchtower not doing your job for some reason)
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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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Portainer
One of their staff members jumped on a video call immediately with me and led me through the problem and solution during a quick session of screen sharing. In this day and age that is above and beyond, especially when it comes to software. It took approximately 5-10 minutes to diagnose and fix, including pleasantries!
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Implementation Rating
F5
No answers on this topic
Portainer
It is really easy. Just follow the documentation.
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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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Portainer
Portainer takes the cup in terms of usability and features. It is also more useful for smaller deployments, whereas Kubernetes in our opinion and experience, could probably be more suited to certain other use cases. Portainer is also a fresh feel among all the preexisting container management solutions and brings positivity and a new breeze in the industry.
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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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Portainer
  • Increased productivity: Portainer's user-friendly interface and streamlined container management can help increase the productivity of IT teams.
  • Cost savings: By simplifying container management, Portainer can help reduce the time and resources required to manage container environments, potentially leading to cost savings.
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ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

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

Portainer Screenshots

Screenshot of Portainer is a universal container management platform to help adopt and manage Docker, Kubernetes, Nomad and Edge environments.