head to head · open source
nginx vs gost
nginx has 31,712 GitHub stars, 8,306 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. gost has 7,522 stars, 830 forks, 101 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nginx leads on adoption by 322% (31,712 vs 7,522 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; gost is written in Go under MIT. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, gost 11%. gost was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 6 topic tags (http, http2, http3, https), 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 | gost | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 7.5K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.3K | ⑂ 830 |
| 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 gost if
- You want the gost feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and gost 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 gost
gost, short for GO Simple Tunnel, is an MIT licensed tunnelling tool written in Go that unifies forward proxying, TCP/UDP port forwarding and reverse proxy tunnelling in a single binary, intended for network and infrastructure engineers who need to connect segmented networks, expose internal services, or route traffic through intermediaries without assembling several single purpose programs.
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or gost more popular?
nginx has 31,712 GitHub stars and gost has 7,522. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and gost free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and gost under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and gost?
nginx is written in C and gost 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 gost?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (31,712 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose gost if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.