Nginx

Nginx is an open-source (BSD-2-Clause) web server, reverse proxy, and load balancer originally written by Igor Sysoev (2004), now maintained by F5, Inc., which acquired NGINX Inc. in 2019. As of July 2026 the latest releases are 1.31.3 (mainline) and 1.30.4 (stable) per nginx.org's download page; both branches shipped 2026 CVE fixes including HTTP/2 request-injection and use-after-free bugs. Nginx uses an asynchronous, event-driven worker-process architecture (epoll/kqueue) rather than Apache's thread-per-connection model, correlating with the largest installed base of any web server: 32.8% of sites with a known server per W3Techs (April 2026), ahead of Apache's 23.7%. The commercial tier, NGINX Plus, has no public list price; resellers quote roughly $2,500+ per instance per year. Current version/status: 1.31.3 mainline / 1.30.4 stable (July 2026). License: BSD-2-Clause (open source core); NGINX Plus is commercial/proprietary. Pricing: Core nginx is free; NGINX Plus (F5) has no published list price — resellers/marketplaces report roughly $2,500+ per instance per year, plus a separate WAF add-on around $2,000/instance/year. Maintained by F5, Inc. (acquired NGINX Inc. in 2019); open-source core remains BSD-licensed on nginx.org/GitHub.

Also known as: nginx, Engine X, NGINX, NginX, ngx

🧊Why learn Nginx?

Pick nginx when you need a battle-tested reverse proxy or static-file server in front of a monolith or a handful of services and you're fine hand-writing config — its epoll-based core still edges out Caddy and Traefik on raw static-file throughput in most 2026 third-party benchmarks. Don't pick it for Kubernetes-native microservices with rotating pod IPs — Traefik's CRD-based service discovery beats hand-reloading nginx configs on every deploy. And if you just want HTTPS to work without a cron job for cert renewal, Caddy's automatic ACME is the honest upgrade nginx's core still doesn't ship. F5 itself pushes anyone wanting real load-balancing observability toward paid NGINX Plus — the free tier's status module is a stub. Known weakness: Core open-source nginx has no built-in automatic TLS/ACME renewal or native service-discovery integration — both are stock features in Caddy and Traefik respectively — so nginx users bolt on certbot or an ingress controller themselves.

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