head to head · open source
nginx vs hestiacp
nginx has 31,703 GitHub stars, 8,305 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. hestiacp has 4,503 stars, 945 forks, 146 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nginx leads on adoption by 604% (31,703 vs 4,503 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; hestiacp is written in Shell under GPL-3.0. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, hestiacp 21%. hestiacp was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (nginx), 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 | hestiacp | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 4.5K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | C | Shell |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-21 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.3K | ⑂ 945 |
| 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 hestiacp if
- You want the hestiacp feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Shell
- You evaluated both and hestiacp 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 hestiacp
Hestia Control Panel is a GPL 3.0, shell based control panel that gives Linux server administrators a web and command line interface for deploying and managing web domains, mail accounts, DNS zones, and databases on Debian and Ubuntu servers.
read the full hestiacp overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or hestiacp more popular?
nginx has 31,703 GitHub stars and hestiacp has 4,503. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and hestiacp free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and hestiacp under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and hestiacp?
nginx is written in C and hestiacp in Shell. 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 hestiacp?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (31,703 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose hestiacp if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.