NGINX

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.

Performance

Reliability

Low configuration

Rarely used in development

Difficult to tell if it changed values from a server behind it

Reverse proxy

Simple web server

Kubernetes ingress

Complex confusing configuration.

Advanced features are paywalled.

No great way to generate configurations with input.

Limiting the number of simultaneous connections or requests coming from one address

Prompt Static content delivery

code caching and reverse proxy server

NJS Scripting Language.

Much more areas of application

A bit hard to implement.

Load balancing.

Proxy server.

Config files aren't as straightforward as Apache.

Great customization

Very well documented

Better built in documentation

SSL/TLS encryption - Incredibly simple to configure and use.

Gzipping - Quickly and easily compress responses to save network cycles.

Lack of logging tools - Simply writes logs to files that you have to manually navigate.

No GUI - All configuration from a console. This could be a pro or a con to some.

Nginx provides a very good caching mechanism as compared to other web servers. It helps to increase the performance of application when users hit the same address again and again in short period of time. This caching mechanism has many options available and it helps to configure it any way.

Nginx is a light weight web server which forwards the requests from the user to application server. If we host multiple sites on same Nginx server, the load of the server doesn't increase.

Nginx rewrite rules bring more flexibility to configure permanent or temporary redirections for some of the URLs

Nginx works best when we use it as front end proxy server for any application

Nginx is best in managing the Production and DR environments in an active mode. It is applicable for some of the applications when local file systems are shared across servers.

Load balancing is the thing where Nginx needs more improvement when I compare it with HAProxy. HAProxy provides more flexibility than Nginx for load balancing for clustered applications.

Nginx monitoring is good but not best. Teams have to improve the monitoring of Nginx where we can easily track the ddos attacks or multiple connections from one IP or multiple requests coming from one IP then they need to block it etc. i.e. Nginx must provide more flexibility in configuring more scenarios, which we do manually to improve the application performance.

Nginx needs improvement in the logging mechanism. Nginx must provide their own commands to get the desired output from the logs. So that instead of using unix commands and grep particular things, if Nginx provides better commands which can easily trace the logs in desired way, it will bring more flexibility to the system administrator.

Nginx can be set up to serve up a web site in minutes.

Nginx is easily customizable. You can easily serve over HTTPS, have custom directories, or proxy upstream servers.

Nginx has great support and documentation, even for the free version.

I had some initial problems proxying PHP.

It’s easy to over complicate your setup.

Like many applications, some of the error codes can be pretty ambiguous.

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.

Stability. It runs quietly and never goes down.

Flexibility. It can run in all the Linux distro.

Compatibility. It works with PHP and MYSQL well.

It's free.

Community. Compare to Apache, Nginx has much smaller community support. You do not have lots of resources you can use when you encounter a problem accept digging into it and trying to figure it out yourself.

Lacks Large Scale Experience. Nginx is not the first choice for enterprise level architecture. Most large companies will use Apache instead of Nginx when it comes to large scale architecture. Here is where Nginx's lightweight advantage becomes their con.

Lack of multiple modules compatibility. Because Nginx is a lightweight focused server, it cannot be used with some other modules. That also makes Nginx favorable for people with small websites.

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

Reliable load balancing capabilities

Caching of static assets is great

SSL handling is good

Relatively simple configurable proxy solution

Open source hence accessibility is easy to larger audience

Nginx plus is a bit on higher end on pricing for small organisations

Automatic Nginx configuration & services update for open source version is something which would be a welcoming step. Currently everything needs to be done manually

Web GUI console could be a slight better and some configurations from there itself would be highly appreciated

Handles HTTP connections very well. The way it uses your OS features and don't try to reinvent the wheel is awesome.

Things you can do with your POST requests are countless. You can rewrite your request and responses entirely.

Supporting Lua, Js, etc. If you know a bit of scripting also, there is no limit to what you can achieve.

I don't really have any cons, because I recommend people switch to Nginx.

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

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

SSL handling

Configuration is very unique, and has a learning curve, but powerful and generally clear

Very active user groups

Decent customer support

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.

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

Nginx supports millions of requests per second

Nginx supports our high availability schemes

Nginx ensures that our information and resources are available and secure

The Nginx team has been very proactive when we need help, support and in the renew of licenses process

In five years we only have had 10 minutes of unavailability because of Nginx. However, Nginx support was very helpful for us.

Straight-forward configuration format that users of all skill levels can learn, and yet is powerful enough for the huge breadth of features that Nginx provides.

Massive scale right out the box. We've never had a Nginx instance overwhelmed by requests, and if we did it would be trivial to spin up more Nginx instances to handle the load.

SSL termination means that we can deliver content over HTTPS without needing our individual services to require TLS support. This saves us a lot of time and headache while keeping us secure.

Nginx is open-source and free, meaning that anyone can use it to power their services, from individual projects to billion-dollar websites.

The open-source flavor of Nginx does not support automatic service discovery. In the time of Docker containers, Kubernetes and other managed cloud services, it can be difficult to manually update Nginx configurations as services change.

Nginx is quite heavy for smaller projects and low-traffic scenarios. It requires knowledge of operating and configuring, which is separate from operating the main web server. There are managed alternatives that will get web services up faster and be more reliable.

Nginx-plus has some very valuable tools that projects of any size could take advantage of. Unfortunately, it is very expensive as it includes SLA and support, putting it out of reach of all but the most well-funded projects.

Lightweight

Great community

A lot of documentation available

Regular webinars where you can ask the experts questions

A user-friendly web console to add some configurations would be appreciated

Nginx is typically blazing fast. It's hard for other web servers to touch it in terms of raw speed and efficiency.

Nginx has a simple and intuitive configuration language which is easier for me to keep in my head than the more verbose Apache syntax.

Nginx is very powerful as a web server, offering the ability to utilize many of the same features as Apache, sometimes in even better ways.

Nginx works great as a reverse proxy, too! It can sit in front of a separate server, or even a cluster of servers, and intelligently handle serving requests to and responses from those servers, including a highly-configurable caching layer.

Nginx often requires some initial configuration. It's worth doing, because you'll end up with great results, but it can be slightly daunting for someone to get started using it. Apache might have a leg up in that regard--When you install Apache, typically it's just about ready to do what you want already. But the issue with Apache is that most people skip the extensive tuning phase required after that, and with nginx it becomes more just a part of the configuration process.

Sometimes, the configuration syntax, even though it's powerful and terse, isn't the most intuitive. Luckily there's plenty of documentation about what things mean and how to accomplish certain things. There may not be much that can be done about this--to have a powerful web server, you need a powerful-enough configuration language.

The nginx brand is somewhat fragmented, and it can be confusing. There's the open source nginx web server, which I've primarily been referring to. But then there's NGINX Plus, a premium subscription-based service which works with a range of other NGINX products (NGINX WAF, NGINX Amplify, NGINX Controller). I've met a number of people who weren't very familiar with nginx, and instinctively went to nginx.com first, and from there it seems like everything costs money. It's only when they realize there's a different site, nginx.org, that they find what they went looking for.

Nginx excels at serving static assets (images, cached files).

Nginx is fantastic for load-balancing and routing requests to back-end application servers.

Nginx is built for scaling and is an excellent solution for high-traffic websites.

Nginx has good features for protecting against certain security exploits.

Nginx has some peculiarities or "gotchas" that take getting used to.

Nginx could improve at SSL handling.

Nginx is the best asynchronous server but I could see using Apache for process-based (threaded) serving of dynamic assets as a back-end behind Nginx. So I don't think Nginx should necessarily improve in this regard as much as it's choosing the right tool for the job—Nginx for static serving, other, process-based servers for dynamic serving.

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's best feature is what it was designed for in the first place, providing a high amount of simultaneous connections with less hardware resources. NginX is at minimum, twice as fast as Apache with static requests, and equal to Apache with PHP requests.

Nginx was created appr. 5 years after Apache, giving it the benefit of Apache's hind-sight, which has allowed NginX to be designed to better handle, or simply bypass and hand-off processes to better equipped software.

NginX includes quite a few very useful performance enhancing tools built in, such as advanced caching techniques (converting proxied dynamic content to static content for faster caching), native reverse proxy support, and best of all, built-in load balancing that is very easy to use.

The NginX setup and deployment is very easy, as the entire configuration is located in 2 files, consisting of a general server config, and a site-specific config for virtual hosts, allowing the greenest of Linux admins to easily deploy a web server.

Even though Nginx is the 2nd most used web server, it is rarely recognized by anyone outside of an IT field that uses it directly. This makes it a very hard sell, especially within start-up companies (a great place for NginX) relying upon VC funding, where brand recognition of the providers/manufacturers used in your IT environment can be a factor in funding.

Due to being less known, NginX does lack on advanced community support along with modules and add-ons when compared to Apache, luckily the community support available is generally more than enough. The same goes for locating experienced NginX administrators, but again, the learning curve is very small. allowing staff to be adequately trained in a short amount of time.

Due to the first point I made, a lot of software does not come with pre-configs for NginX