🆚 Nginx vs. Varnish

Nginx is a lightweight, high-performance open-source HTTP server and reverse proxy designed for handling large volumes of concurrent connections with low memory usage.

It supports serving static files, reverse proxying, load balancing for HTTP, TCP, and UDP traffic, SSL/TLS termination with SNI, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, WebSocket proxying, response compression, and zero-downtime configuration reloads.

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Varnish Cache is an open-source HTTP accelerator and reverse caching proxy that caches content from web servers to reduce load times, and supports native TLS termination and Kubernetes deployments.

It uses the VCL configuration language compiled to native C code, serves cached responses in three system calls, provides official container images and a Helm chart for Kubernetes, outputs structured JSON logs, and supports VMOD extension modules.

Popularity

Determined by the number of sites using each technology.

• 🥇 Most popular in the United States in the Caching category.
• 🥇 Most popular in the United States in the Web Servers category.
• 🥇 Most popular in Japan in the Caching category.
• 🥇 Most popular in Japan in the Web Servers category.
• 🥇 Most popular in Germany in the Caching category.

• 🥇 Most popular in the United States in the Load Balancers category.
• 🥇 Most popular in the United Kingdom in the Load Balancers category.
• 🥇 Most popular in France in the Load Balancers category.
• 🥇 Most popular in Germany in the Load Balancers category.
• 🥇 Most popular in Denmark in the Load Balancers category.

Top sites

Top-ranked sites that use these technologies.

Compare alternatives

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• Varnish vs. Envoy
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• Varnish vs. Ngrok
• Varnish vs. Squid

• Nginx technology profile
• F5, Inc. company profile

• Varnish technology profile