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NGINX

NGINX

Overview

What is NGINX?

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…

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Recent Reviews

NGINX Review

10 out of 10
March 22, 2024
Incentivized
Using NGINX for some Reverse Proxy services for security purposes. Helps to mask the IP address of our true IP Address. Looking to see …
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great

8 out of 10
March 22, 2024
Incentivized
Apache web server has replaced by NGINX server. could see potential benefits by using this product instead of apache. Infact its quite …
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NGINX Review

9 out of 10
September 15, 2023
Incentivized
We use it as the ATTP server and it is one of the very popular ATTP servers on the market. It's free and it has really good speed compared …
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NGINX Review

9 out of 10
September 15, 2023
Incentivized
I use it for mostly host websites or anything that needs to be host. So we have our on-prem server where we host ourselves.
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NGINX Review

9 out of 10
September 15, 2023
Incentivized
So we use it in our app development. We use NGINX servers for deploying our apps. We don't have any challenges so far. We are pretty much …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 6 features
  • Installation (18)
    9.4
    94%
  • Application server performance (18)
    8.6
    86%
  • Administration and management (18)
    8.0
    80%
  • Security management (18)
    8.0
    80%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

What is NGINX?

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…

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.nginx.com/products/pricing

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Demos

CVE-2016-1247 Nginx (Debian-based) Vulnerability - Root Priv. Escalation PoC Exploit Demo

YouTube

Nginx Web Server configuration with Examples

YouTube

Load Balancing with NGINX

YouTube

Access your internal websites! Nginx Reverse Proxy in Home Assistant.

YouTube

How to Serve Static Content

YouTube

Using NGINX Open Source for Video Streaming and Storage

YouTube
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Features

Application Servers

An Application Server provides services and infrastructure for developing, deploying, and running applications

8.2
Avg 8.0
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Product Details

What is NGINX?

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 applications with performance, reliability, security, and scale. This includes NGINX Plus for load balancing, reverse proxy, and application delivery controller features, NGINX App Protect for high performance web application firewall security, and NGINX Unit to run the application code, all monitored and managed by the NGINX Controller.
  • NGINX Plus: An all‑in‑one load balancer, web server, and content cache.
  • NGINX Controller: Centralized monitoring and management for NGINX Plus.
  • NGINX App Protect: Web application firewall, powered by F5
  • NGINX Unit: Lightweight application server, with support for multiple languages and a dynamic REST API‑driven configuration
  • NGINX Ingress Controller: Traffic management solution for cloud‑native apps in Kubernetes and containerized environments.
  • NGINX Service Mesh: Lightweight, Turnkey, Developer-Friendly Service Mesh Using NGINX Plus as an Enterprise Sidecar

NGINX Features

Application Servers Features

  • Supported: IDE support
  • Supported: Security management
  • Supported: Administration and management
  • Supported: Application server performance
  • Supported: Installation
  • Supported: Open-source standards compliance

Additional Features

  • Supported: NGINX: Fast, light web server and reverse proxy
  • Supported: NGINX Plus: All‑in‑one Load Balancer, Web Server, and Content Cache
  • Supported: NGINX Plus: Security controls, High Availability, Dynamic Modules
  • Supported: NGINX App Protect: Layer 7 Attack Protection
  • Supported: NGINX Controller: Centralized Traffic Management and Monitoring
  • Supported: NGINX Controller: Role-based Access Controls
  • Supported: NGINX Unit: Multi-language Application Server

NGINX Screenshots

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

NGINX Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Microsoft IIS and HAProxy Community Edition are common alternatives for NGINX.

Reviewers rate Installation highest, with a score of 9.4.

The most common users of NGINX are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).

NGINX Customer Size Distribution

Consumers0%
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)0%
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees)50%
Enterprises (more than 500 employees)50%
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(137)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-11 of 11)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use NGINX when building POC labs in Azure and AWS to demonstrate IaaS solutions. Both as a simple test web server or as a reverse proxy, depending on the specifics in the POC.
  • Works great to provide a test web page for cloud designing POCs
  • With the limited small usage we do with NGINX, its hard to say it needs any improvement for our purposes.
We do not find any simpler or faster to deploy web server/reverse proxy in Azure or AWS Marketplaces than with NGINX.
September 15, 2023

NGINX Review

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it as the ATTP server and it is one of the very popular ATTP servers on the market. It's free and it has really good speed compared with the all-party ATTP server.
  • The good thing about this product compared with other ATTP server the performance speed.
  • No, I think at least compared with other products, this ATTP server is really good.
It's pretty much good for all the web applications.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Most of our applications are container based and load balanced. Having multiple servers in the backend is challenging and using an external load balancer makes you lose control of the mechanics. That is where NGINX comes into picture. We create config files on our EC2 instances and control how the load balancer functions via NGINX
  • Load balancer
  • Load sharing
  • Web server
  • Reverse Proxy
  • Community support is limited
Well suited for web server hosting, load balancing, using reverse proxy to point to an alias. I don't think we can leverage it fully on windows
Anatoly Geyfman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use NGINX as our web-facing server, behind which we have a collection of services serving various parts of our application. NGINX helps us map a single API over a variety of services, and make our API endpoints consistent across the various services. Nginx also helps with uptime, by helping us switch between various instances of the services in near real-time.
  • Extremely high-performing -- NGINX is never a bottleneck.
  • Easy to configure -- the configuration language is easy to learn, and allows very flexible scenarios.
  • Lightweight -- it's a very small service, which is never a memory or CPU hog.
  • Management tools -- Nginx has good errors, but it would be nice if it plugged into our cloud hosting infrastructure a little easier.
  • Configuration error detection -- for more complex configurations, sometimes Nginx isn't overly helpful when telling us what's wrong.
Ngnix is best suited as a public-facing proxy for everything that you might want to host. From WordPress to APIs, Ngnix does an extremely great job passing requests to those services, logging these requests in flexible ways, throttling requests when necessary, and even simplifying the downstream services by taking on some of the path extraction responsibilities (like extracting variables from paths and passing them in as headers).

It's not an application server, although they're working on it.
Leonel Quinteros | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nginx is present at different levels across my projects. Sometimes is just a Web Server, others a Load Balancer or an API proxy with SSL/TLS management, it's just great that's so lightweight that you can deploy as many instances as you want, for different purposes and create a services mesh inside your organization's network.
  • Low memory footprint, high performance, low maintenance.
  • Modular, configurable, flexible. You can create totally different nodes from the same Nginx version. I.e. you can use 1 instance to run a Web Server and another to run a gRPC rate limiter.
  • Nginx Plus suite is awesome! and has really nice features for high end users as well. It complements really well with the core, open source products.
  • Great ecosystem for API and Microservices management and governance
  • Excellent Web Server, of course!
  • Some parts or modules form Nginx Plus suite would be really useful in the Open Source world. But it's just about paying the fee or implement it yourself though.
  • No .htaccess support (https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/examples/likeapache-htaccess/)
  • Low diversity and extension of modules.
When deploying API services, we need to take care of many aspects of the network where they work. Infrastructure is also a factor when limited, so you also need to limit and manage it according to its use. Nginx is great to construct these network nodes (HTTP, API Proxy) that connects everything and can add extra capabilities like security (ModSecurity, SSL/TLS) and availability (Load Balancer, Rate Limit).

Gregory Pecqueur | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Nginx as a load balancer and as a reverse proxy for all of our web services. We use it to serve NodeJs applications, REST APIs and Angular front.
  • Great community
  • A lot of documentation available
  • High-performing
  • Easy to configure
  • Cache static assets
  • Multi-threaded support
  • A user-friendly UI console to test some configurations in a test server
Nginx is a very good web server and proxy. To serve NodeJs applications, Nginx + pm2 is very efficient. Coupled with Passenger, it allows MEAN Stacks applications to be deployed very easily.
February 08, 2019

Fast and configurable

Shea Bunge | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Ever since discovering Nginx as an alternative to Apache, it has been my web server of choice for a variety of purposes, whether it be creating a versatile development server accommodating a variety of platforms across many different sites, or setting up a high-speed scalable server with integration with a popular content management system for a client. The powerful yet flexible configuration options of Nginx makes it straightforward to configure a server for a multitude of different tasks, and a clear choice for almost any situation.
  • Powerful and flexible configuration
  • Low resource usage with low overhead
  • Well-supported on major operating systems
  • Less well-known in communities than Apache, making it more difficult to find documentation and support
  • Requires manual configuration for integration with some popular CMS
Nginx is well suited for many different sorts of websites, whether they be for serving static content or making use of a back-end scripting language. As Nginx is not as well supported as some alternatives, support for integration with some software platforms may be lacking and require manual configuration. For this reason, Nginx may be a little more difficult to use for those unfamiliar with server administration.
Gabriel Samaroo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Nginx to serve static content for a few of our applications. Nginx is very effective for us because it's free, scales very well, and can handle millions of requests a second. It has made several of our websites noticeably faster. In addition, its ability to act as a Proxy/Reverse Proxy has been instrumental in fulfilling our specific web hosting needs.
  • 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)!
  • Less community support compared to Apache
  • Less extensive list of modules compared to Apache
Nginx is well suited for serving any static content - whether that be images, JS files, HTML files, CSS files, videos, etc. If you have a high-traffic website, Nginx will be a great fit because it handles large number of requests extremely efficiently. Nginx has full support on Unix systems, but only has limited support on Microsoft Windows machines.
Ilya Popovich | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Nginx as load balancing for our complex web applications and proxying requests to different applications across the company. It has a small footprint and memory usage, so it's the best choice solution for us.
  • Static assets caching
  • Extremely simply configurable proxy solution
  • Load balancing is awesome
  • The robustness is on the top
  • Steep learning curve: you'll spend lots of time to read all manuals and specs before you can configure it correctly
  • SSL handling is poor
For high-load projects it's a must-have solution, so I definitely would recommend to anyone.
Anand Chhatpar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nginx is used as the main web server and load balancer in front of our Rails apps. We use Nginx + Passenger together as part of our stack for production deployments of our Rails apps.

We currently have 5 different deployments of Nginx, and everyone in the company that deploys production apps uses them.

The main business problem addressed by Nginx was definitely speed and load balancing. Before using Nginx + Passenger, we had Apache servers in front of Mongrel for our rails apps, and they not only were slow and memory intensive, the only load balancing strategy available with that setup was round-robin allocation of incoming web requests to different app servers. With Nginx, it acts as a load balancing proxy as well and keeps track of which app servers are free to receive new requests. This resolves bottlenecks in our server's performance.
  • Nginx works really well for serving static files. You can let requests for static files and assets pass directly through to the file system and Nginx will serve them really fast, without touching your web app processes.
  • Nginx does a great job with load balancing. You can set up different load balancing strategies, but the default load balancer it comes with out of the box works very well already -- better than any round-robin approach because it checks for availability of the resource before handing off the incoming request.
  • Nginx is more memory efficient and generally faster than Apache. It has a small footprint, which can be very helpful, especially if you're running on a VPS.
  • Nginx has not crashed on me even once. The robustness of Nginx overall is very impressive.
  • You can apply configuration changes to Nginx without needing to restart the server. You can also do reloads of the config without dropping any web requests because Nginx provides a global queue where requests can be held while it reloads the config.
  • There's no configuration wizard. I had to read their docs every time I make a change to the Nginx config files.
  • Deploying rails apps with Nginx + Passenger requires a recompilation of Nginx. It would have been better if Nginx supported a plugin system that would allow you to plug in some rails app servers into it.
  • There's no easy way to tell which incoming request was sent to which back-end app server. You have to do advanced tricks to keep track of those things, in case you need to see what's happening behind the scenes for debugging.
Nginx is great as a web server. For serving Rails apps, Nginx + Puma seems to have become the norm, but has memory leakage issues because of Puma. Nginx itself is quite robust and we find Nginx + Passenger as the right production-ready setup for deploying Ruby on Rails apps. I cannot think of any specific scenarios where I would recommend against using Nginx.
Chris Coppenbarger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Nginx is a http server software used to serve up websites across the web, similar to Apache httpd. The main difference being that Nginx offers multi-threaded support to serve up websites faster and more efficiently. I implement and use it as often as possible for my websites I build in order to provide the speed and efficiency that is required. It is easy to use one config file to serve up both the http and https versions of the site.
  • Multi-threaded support is great in that it isolates each hit to the web server to cut down on crashes and deliver speed.
  • Easy configuration files for both http and https support.
  • Small footprint and memory usage.
  • Not as many configuration options as Apache httpd.
  • Can be confusing to set up if used to Apache's config options.
  • Confusing to figure out how to set up mods.
Nginx is well suited for most areas where you are using an Apache httpd server. If you need a vast array of configuration options, Apache might be more well suited, but over all I would recommend switching to Nginx for serving up websites.
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