head to head · open source
nginx vs tengine
nginx has 32,064 GitHub stars, 8,388 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped yesterday. tengine has 13,418 stars, 2,509 forks, 502 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. nginx leads on adoption by 139% (32,064 vs 13,418 stars). nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause; tengine is written in C under BSD-2-Clause. nginx has attracted 26% as many forks as stars, tengine 19%. nginx was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 5 topic tags (http3, load-balancer, nginx, quic), 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 | tengine | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 32K | ★ 13K |
| License | BSD-2-Clause | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | C | C |
| Last push | 2026-11-05 | 2026-09-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.4K | ⑂ 2.5K |
| 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 tengine if
- You want the tengine feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-2-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches C
- You evaluated both and tengine 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 tengine
Tengine Visit tengine.taobao.org for the full documentation, examples and guides. Introduction Tengine is a high performance web server and reverse proxy originated by Taobao, the largest e commerce website in Asia. It offers HTTP/3, Kubernetes Ingress support, zero downtime dynamic configuration, active upstream health checks, and NTLS/TLCP (SM2/SM3/SM4), while remaining 100% compatible with nginx. Tengine has proven to be very stable and efficient on some of the top 100 websites in the world, including taobao.com and tmall.com. Tengine has been an open source project since December 2011. It is being actively…
read the full tengine overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or tengine more popular?
nginx has 32,064 GitHub stars and tengine has 13,418. nginx has the larger community by that measure.
Are nginx and tengine free?
Both are open source. nginx is licensed under BSD-2-Clause and tengine under BSD-2-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between nginx and tengine?
nginx is written in C and tengine 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 tengine?
Choose nginx if you want the larger community (32,064 stars) or its BSD-2-Clause licence terms. Choose tengine if its feature set, stack or BSD-2-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.