head to head · open source
nginx vs netgoat
nginx has 31,952 GitHub stars, 8,277 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. netgoat has 902 stars, 50 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. nginx leads on adoption by 3,442% (31,952 vs 902 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; netgoat is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, netgoat 6%. nginx was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (reverse-proxy), 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 | netgoat | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 902 |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-10-23 | 2026-10-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.3K | ⑂ 50 |
| 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 netgoat if
- You want the netgoat feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and netgoat 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 netgoat
NetGoat agent NetGoat is a self hosted reverse proxy and traffic policy agent written in Go. It can run from a local YAML configuration, consume snapshots from the companion control plane, and continue serving the last known good configuration during an outage. [!WARNING] NetGoat is active alpha software ( v0.1.0 alpha.1 ; git tags going forward are v , see docs/release.md). The shipped configuration contains no routes. Review every upstream, use strong bootstrap credentials, and place administrative services behind authenticated TLS before exposing a deployment to the internet. Feature status This table is the…
read the full netgoat overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or netgoat more popular?
nginx has 31,952 GitHub stars and netgoat has 902. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and netgoat free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and netgoat under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and netgoat?
nginx is written in C and netgoat 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 netgoat?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (31,952 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose netgoat if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.