head to head · open source
nginx vs aralez
nginx has 31,970 GitHub stars, 8,294 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. aralez has 804 stars, 34 forks, 4 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. nginx leads on adoption by 3,876% (31,970 vs 804 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; aralez is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, aralez 4%. aralez was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (load-balancer, 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
| nginx | aralez | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 804 |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-10-23 | 2026-10-23 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.3K | ⑂ 34 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick nginx if
- You weight community size — 32K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick aralez if
- You want the aralez feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and aralez fits your workflow better
About nginx
NGINX (pronounced "engine x" or "en jin eks") is the world's most popular Web Server, high performance Load Balancer, Reverse Proxy, API Gateway and Content Cache. NGINX is free and open source software, distributed under the terms of a simplified 2 clause BSD like license. Enterprise distributions, commercial support and training are available from F5, Inc. [!IMPORTANT] The goal of this README is to provide a basic, structured introduction to NGINX for novice users. Please refer to the full NGINX documentation for detailed information on installing, building, configuring, debugging, and more. These…
read the full nginx overview →
About aralez
Aralez (Արալեզ) Reverse proxy built on top of Cloudflare's Pingora Aralez is a high performance Rust reverse proxy with zero configuration automatic protocol handling, TLS, and upstream management, featuring Consul and Kubernetes integration for dynamic pod discovery and health checked routing, acting as a lightweight ingress style proxy. What Aralez means ? Aralez = Արալեզ Named after the legendary Armenian guardian spirit, winged dog like creature, that descend upon fallen heroes to lick their wounds and resurrect them . Built on Rust, on top of Cloudflare’s Pingora engine , Aralez delivers world class…
read the full aralez overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or aralez more popular?
nginx has 31,970 GitHub stars and aralez has 804. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and aralez free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and aralez under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and aralez?
nginx is written in C and aralez in Rust. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, nginx or aralez?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (31,970 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose aralez if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.