head to head · open source
nginx vs goshs
nginx has 32,122 GitHub stars, 8,396 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. goshs has 1,014 stars, 61 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nginx leads on adoption by 3,068% (32,122 vs 1,014 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; goshs is written in Go under MIT. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, goshs 6%. goshs 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 | goshs | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 1.0K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-09 | 2026-11-14 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 61 |
| 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 goshs if
- You want the goshs feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and goshs 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 goshs
You're mid engagement. You need to transfer a file, catch an SMB hash, or stand up a quick HTTPS server — and python3 m http.server won't cut it. goshs is a single binary file server built for the moments when you need more than Python's SimpleHTTPServer but don't want to configure Apache. HTTP/S, WebDAV, FTP/SFTP, SMB, LDAP/S, basic auth, share links, DNS/SMTP callbacks, NTLM hash capture + cracking — all from one command. Demo Try it out yourself: demo.goshs.de Quick Start Documentation For a detailed documentation go to docs.goshs.de Features Installation 🐚 Shell completion goshs can install tab completion…
read the full goshs overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or goshs more popular?
nginx has 32,122 GitHub stars and goshs has 1,014. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and goshs free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and goshs under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and goshs?
nginx is written in C and goshs 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 goshs?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (32,122 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose goshs if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.