head to head · open source
nginx vs pdns
nginx has 31,712 GitHub stars, 8,306 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped 7 days ago. pdns has 4,473 stars, 1,026 forks, 932 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nginx leads on adoption by 609% (31,712 vs 4,473 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; pdns is written in C++ under GPL-2.0. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, pdns 23%. pdns 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 | pdns | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 4.5K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | C | C++ |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-22 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.3K | ⑂ 1.0K |
| 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 pdns if
- You want the pdns feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches C++
- You evaluated both and pdns 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 pdns
PowerDNS (pdns) is a single C++ source repository containing three distinct DNS products — the PowerDNS Authoritative Server, the PowerDNS Recursor, and dnsdist, a DNS load balancer — and it is aimed at network and infrastructure operators who run DNS themselves.
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or pdns more popular?
nginx has 31,712 GitHub stars and pdns has 4,473. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and pdns free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and pdns under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and pdns?
nginx is written in C and pdns 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 pdns?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (31,712 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose pdns if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.