head to head · open source
caddy vs tengine
caddy has 78,819 GitHub stars, 5,235 forks, 286 open issues and last shipped today. tengine has 13,418 stars, 2,509 forks, 502 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. caddy leads on adoption by 487% (78,819 vs 13,418 stars). caddy is written in Go under Apache-2.0; tengine is written in C under BSD-2-Clause. caddy has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, tengine 19%. caddy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (http3, reverse-proxy), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| caddy | tengine | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 79K | ★ 13K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-06 | 2026-09-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.2K | ⑂ 2.5K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick caddy if
- You weight community size — 79K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick tengine if
- You want the tengine feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and tengine fits your workflow better
About caddy
a project Every site on HTTPS Caddy is an extensible server platform that uses TLS by default. Releases · Documentation · Get Help Powered by Special thanks to: Warp, built for coding with multiple AI agents Available for MacOS, Linux, & Windows Menu Features Install Build from source For development With version information and/or plugins Quick start Overview Full documentation Getting help About Features Easy configuration with the Caddyfile Powerful configuration with its native JSON config Dynamic configuration with the JSON API Config adapters if you don't like JSON Automatic HTTPS by default ZeroSSL and…
read the full caddy overview →
About tengine
Tengine Visit tengine.taobao.org for the full documentation, examples and guides. Introduction Tengine is a high performance web server and reverse proxy originated by Taobao, the largest e commerce website in Asia. It offers HTTP/3, Kubernetes Ingress support, zero downtime dynamic configuration, active upstream health checks, and NTLS/TLCP (SM2/SM3/SM4), while remaining 100% compatible with nginx. Tengine has proven to be very stable and efficient on some of the top 100 websites in the world, including taobao.com and tmall.com. Tengine has been an open source project since December 2011. It is being actively…
read the full tengine overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is caddy or tengine more popular?
caddy has 78,819 GitHub stars and tengine has 13,418. caddy has the larger community by that measure.
Are caddy and tengine free?
Both are open source. caddy is licensed under Apache-2.0 and tengine under BSD-2-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between caddy and tengine?
caddy is written in Go and tengine in C. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, caddy or tengine?
Choose caddy if you want the larger community (78,819 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose tengine if its feature set, stack or BSD-2-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.