head to head · open source
traefik vs nginx
traefik has 64,895 GitHub stars, 6,201 forks, 939 open issues and last shipped yesterday. nginx has 31,681 stars, 8,302 forks, 468 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. traefik leads on adoption by 105% (64,895 vs 31,681 stars). traefik is written in Go under MIT; nginx is written in C under BSD-2-Clause. traefik has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, nginx 26%. traefik was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (load-balancer, 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
| traefik | nginx | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 65K | ★ 32K |
| License | MIT | BSD-2-Clause |
| Written in | Go | C |
| Last push | 2026-09-18 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 6.2K | ⑂ 8.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick traefik if
- You weight community size — 65K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick nginx if
- You want the nginx 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 nginx fits your workflow better
About traefik
Traefik — pronounced traffic — is "The Cloud Native Application Proxy": an MIT licensed, Go based HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that watches your orchestrator or service registry and generates its own routes, aimed at teams running microservices on Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes, Consul, Etcd, Rancher v2, or Amazon ECS.
read the full traefik overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is traefik or nginx more popular?
traefik has 64,895 GitHub stars and nginx has 31,681. traefik has the larger community by that measure.
Are traefik and nginx free?
Both are open source. traefik is licensed under MIT and nginx under BSD-2-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between traefik and nginx?
traefik is written in Go and nginx 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, traefik or nginx?
Choose traefik if you want the larger community (64,895 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose nginx if its feature set, stack or BSD-2-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.