head to head · open source
nginx vs blocky
nginx has 32,052 GitHub stars, 8,386 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped yesterday. blocky has 7,090 stars, 319 forks, 51 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. nginx leads on adoption by 352% (32,052 vs 7,090 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; blocky is written in Go under Apache-2.0. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, blocky 4%. nginx was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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 | blocky | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 7.1K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 319 |
| 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 blocky if
- You want the blocky 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 blocky 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 blocky
Blocky Blocky is a DNS proxy and ad blocker for the local network written in Go with following features: Features Blocking Blocking of DNS queries with external lists (Ad block, malware) and allowlisting Definition of allow/denylists per client group (Kids, Smart home devices, etc.) Periodical reload of external allow/denylists Regex support Blocking of request domain, response CNAME (deep CNAME inspection) and response IP addresses (against IP lists) Advanced DNS configuration not just an ad blocker Custom DNS resolution for certain domain names Conditional forwarding to external DNS server Upstream resolvers…
read the full blocky overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or blocky more popular?
nginx has 32,052 GitHub stars and blocky has 7,090. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and blocky free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and blocky under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and blocky?
nginx is written in C and blocky 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 blocky?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (32,052 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose blocky if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.