head to head · open source
nginx vs cloudflared
nginx has 32,052 GitHub stars, 8,386 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cloudflared has 16,443 stars, 1,518 forks, 545 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. nginx leads on adoption by 95% (32,052 vs 16,443 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; cloudflared is written in Go under Apache-2.0. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, cloudflared 9%. nginx was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (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 | cloudflared | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 16K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2026-11-04 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 1.5K |
| 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 cloudflared if
- You want the cloudflared 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 cloudflared 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 cloudflared
Cloudflare Tunnel client Contains the command line client for Cloudflare Tunnel, a tunneling daemon that proxies traffic from the Cloudflare network to your origins. This daemon sits between Cloudflare network and your origin (e.g. a webserver). Cloudflare attracts client requests and sends them to you via this daemon, without requiring you to poke holes on your firewall your origin can remain as closed as possible. Extensive documentation can be found in the Cloudflare Tunnel section of the Cloudflare Docs. All usages related with proxying to your origins are available under cloudflared tunnel help . You can…
read the full cloudflared overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or cloudflared more popular?
nginx has 32,052 GitHub stars and cloudflared has 16,443. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and cloudflared free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and cloudflared under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and cloudflared?
nginx is written in C and cloudflared 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 cloudflared?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (32,052 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose cloudflared if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.