head to head · open source
nginx vs pomerium
nginx has 31,742 GitHub stars, 8,309 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. pomerium has 5,020 stars, 357 forks, 159 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. nginx leads on adoption by 532% (31,742 vs 5,020 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; pomerium is written in Go under Apache-2.0. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, pomerium 7%. pomerium 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 | pomerium | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 5.0K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-25 | 2026-09-26 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.3K | ⑂ 357 |
| 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 pomerium if
- You want the pomerium feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and pomerium 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 pomerium
Pomerium is an identity and context aware access proxy, written in Go and released under the Apache 2.0 licence, that builds secure, clientless connections to internal web applications and other services without a corporate VPN.
read the full pomerium overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or pomerium more popular?
nginx has 31,742 GitHub stars and pomerium has 5,020. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and pomerium free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and pomerium under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and pomerium?
nginx is written in C and pomerium 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 pomerium?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (31,742 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose pomerium if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.