head to head · open source
nginx vs sdns
nginx has 31,772 GitHub stars, 8,309 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped yesterday. sdns has 1,086 stars, 72 forks, 0 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nginx leads on adoption by 2,826% (31,772 vs 1,086 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; sdns is written in Go under MIT. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, sdns 7%. nginx 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 | sdns | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 1.1K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | MIT |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-30 | 2026-09-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.3K | ⑂ 72 |
| 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 sdns if
- You want the sdns feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and sdns 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 sdns
sdns is a high performance recursive DNS resolver written in Go that resolves from the root, validates answers against DNSSEC trust anchors and serves DNS over UDP, TCP, TLS, HTTPS and QUIC, intended for operators and privacy focused self hosters who want to run their own resolving name server instead of relying on a third party resolver.
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or sdns more popular?
nginx has 31,772 GitHub stars and sdns has 1,086. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and sdns free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and sdns under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and sdns?
nginx is written in C and sdns 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 sdns?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (31,772 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose sdns if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.