head to head · open source
nginx vs OpenVPN
nginx has 32,033 GitHub stars, 8,410 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. OpenVPN has 14,763 stars, 3,424 forks, 226 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nginx leads on adoption by 117% (32,033 vs 14,763 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; OpenVPN is written in C under a custom or non-standard licence. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, OpenVPN 23%. OpenVPN was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (security), 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 | OpenVPN | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 15K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | Custom / other |
| Written in | C | C |
| Last push | 2026-10-29 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 3.4K |
| 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 OpenVPN if
- You want the OpenVPN feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and OpenVPN 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 OpenVPN
OpenVPN A Secure tunneling daemon Copyright (C) 2002 2026 OpenVPN Inc. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. To get the latest release of OpenVPN, go to: To Build and Install, tar zxf openvpn .tar.gz cd openvpn ./configure make make install or see the file INSTALL for more info. For information on how to build OpenVPN on/for Windows with MinGW or MSVC see README.cmake.md. For detailed information on OpenVPN, including examples, see the man page For a sample VPN…
read the full OpenVPN overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or OpenVPN more popular?
nginx has 32,033 GitHub stars and OpenVPN has 14,763. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and OpenVPN free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause, and OpenVPN has no licence declared in this registry. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between nginx and OpenVPN?
nginx is written in C and OpenVPN in C. 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 OpenVPN?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (32,033 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose OpenVPN if its feature set, stack or Custom / other licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.