head to head · open source
nginx vs coredns
nginx has 32,033 GitHub stars, 8,410 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. coredns has 14,403 stars, 2,553 forks, 282 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nginx leads on adoption by 122% (32,033 vs 14,403 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; coredns is written in Go under Apache-2.0. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, coredns 18%. coredns 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 | coredns | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 14K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-29 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 2.6K |
| 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 coredns if
- You want the coredns 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 coredns 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 coredns
CoreDNS is a DNS server/forwarder, written in Go, that chains plugins. Each plugin performs a (DNS) function. CoreDNS is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation graduated project. CoreDNS is a fast and flexible DNS server. The key word here is flexible : with CoreDNS you are able to do what you want with your DNS data by utilizing plugins. If some functionality is not provided out of the box you can add it by writing a plugin. CoreDNS can listen for DNS requests coming in over: UDP/TCP (go'old DNS). TLS DoT (RFC 7858). DNS over HTTP/2 DoH (RFC 8484). DNS over HTTP/3 DoH3 DNS over QUIC DoQ (RFC 9250). gRPC (not a…
read the full coredns overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or coredns more popular?
nginx has 32,033 GitHub stars and coredns has 14,403. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and coredns free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and coredns under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and coredns?
nginx is written in C and coredns 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 coredns?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (32,033 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose coredns if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.