head to head · open source
nginx vs bfe
nginx has 31,721 GitHub stars, 8,311 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped 9 days ago. bfe has 6,264 stars, 950 forks, 34 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nginx leads on adoption by 406% (31,721 vs 6,264 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; bfe is written in Go under Apache-2.0. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, bfe 15%. bfe 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 | bfe | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 6.3K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-24 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.3K | ⑂ 950 |
| 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 bfe if
- You want the bfe feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and bfe fits your workflow better
About nginx
NGINX is the official open source repository for the NGINX web server and its load balancer, reverse proxy, API gateway and content cache roles, written in C under the BSD 2 Clause licence and aimed at system administrators, DevOps engineers and platform teams who need to serve, balance and protect their own HTTP traffic.
read the full nginx overview →
About bfe
BFE (Beyond Front End) is an open source, Apache 2.0 licensed layer 7 load balancer written in Go, originally built at Baidu and now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project, intended for platform, infrastructure, and networking engineers who need content based routing and centralized traffic management in front of backend services.
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or bfe more popular?
nginx has 31,721 GitHub stars and bfe has 6,264. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and bfe free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and bfe under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and bfe?
nginx is written in C and bfe in Go. 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 bfe?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (31,721 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose bfe if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.