head to head · open source
nginx vs mosdns
nginx has 32,075 GitHub stars, 8,390 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. mosdns has 3,775 stars, 495 forks, 118 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. nginx leads on adoption by 750% (32,075 vs 3,775 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; mosdns is written in Go under GPL-3.0. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, mosdns 13%. nginx 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 | mosdns | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 3.8K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-06 | 2026-02-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 495 |
| 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 mosdns if
- You want the mosdns feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and mosdns 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 mosdns
mosdns 功能概述、配置方式、教程等，详见: wiki 下载预编译文件、更新日志，详见: release docker 镜像: docker hub
read the full mosdns overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or mosdns more popular?
nginx has 32,075 GitHub stars and mosdns has 3,775. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and mosdns free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and mosdns under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and mosdns?
nginx is written in C and mosdns 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 mosdns?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (32,075 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose mosdns if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.