head to head · open source
nginx vs tengine
nginx has 31,703 GitHub stars, 8,305 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped 6 days ago. tengine has 13,371 stars, 2,502 forks, 502 open issues and last shipped 15 days ago. nginx leads on adoption by 137% (31,703 vs 13,371 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 | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-07 |
| Forks | ⑂ 8.3K | ⑂ 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 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 tengine
Tengine is a high performance, BSD 2 Clause licensed web server and reverse proxy that is 100% compatible with nginx, built for operators and platform teams that need HTTP/3, Kubernetes Ingress support, dynamic configuration and Chinese cryptographic standards without abandoning their existing nginx configuration.
read the full tengine overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is nginx or tengine more popular?
nginx has 31,703 GitHub stars and tengine has 13,371. 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 (31,703 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.