head to head · open source
nginx vs nginx-proxy
nginx has 32,033 GitHub stars, 8,410 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. nginx-proxy has 19,933 stars, 3,037 forks, 327 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. nginx leads on adoption by 61% (32,033 vs 19,933 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; nginx-proxy is written in Python under MIT. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, nginx-proxy 15%. nginx-proxy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (nginx, 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 | nginx-proxy | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 20K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | C | Python |
| Last push | 2026-10-29 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 3.0K |
| 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 nginx-proxy if
- You want the nginx-proxy feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and nginx-proxy 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 nginx-proxy
nginx proxy nginx proxy sets up a container running nginx and docker gen. docker gen generates reverse proxy configs for nginx and reloads nginx when containers are started and stopped. See Automated Nginx Reverse Proxy for Docker for why you might want to use this. Usage To run it: Then start any containers (here an nginx container) you want proxied with an env var VIRTUAL HOST=subdomain.yourdomain.com Provided your DNS is setup to resolve foo.bar.com to the host running nginx proxy, a request to will then be routed to a container with the VIRTUAL HOST env var set to foo.bar.com (in this case, the your proxied…
read the full nginx-proxy overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or nginx-proxy more popular?
nginx has 32,033 GitHub stars and nginx-proxy has 19,933. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and nginx-proxy free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and nginx-proxy under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and nginx-proxy?
nginx is written in C and nginx-proxy in Python. 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 nginx-proxy?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (32,033 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose nginx-proxy if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.