head to head · open source
nginx vs sliver
nginx has 31,681 GitHub stars, 8,302 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. sliver has 11,852 stars, 1,587 forks, 222 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nginx leads on adoption by 167% (31,681 vs 11,852 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; sliver is written in Go under GPL-3.0. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, sliver 13%. sliver was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (http), 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 | sliver | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 12K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | C | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-18 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.3K | ⑂ 1.6K |
| 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 sliver if
- You want the sliver feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and sliver 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 sliver
Sliver is an open source, cross platform adversary emulation and red team framework written in Go, used by security teams of all sizes to perform authorized security testing with implants that support command and control over Mutual TLS (mTLS), WireGuard, HTTP(S), and DNS.
read the full sliver overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or sliver more popular?
nginx has 31,681 GitHub stars and sliver has 11,852. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and sliver free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and sliver under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and sliver?
nginx is written in C and sliver 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 sliver?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (31,681 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose sliver if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.