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NGINX Plus VS Traefik

Compare NGINX Plus VS Traefik and see what are their differences

NGINX Plus logo NGINX Plus

NGINX Plus is an open-source software load balancer that improves the speed of the applications and enhances the distribution of workloads.

Traefik logo Traefik

Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy
  • NGINX Plus Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-30
  • Traefik Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-13

NGINX Plus features and specs

  • Scalability
    NGINX Plus can efficiently handle a large number of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for high-traffic websites and services.
  • Advanced Load Balancing
    Offers sophisticated load balancing features that can optimize traffic distribution across multiple servers and ensure high availability.
  • Performance
    Known for its speed and efficiency, NGINX Plus can significantly reduce latency and improve overall application performance.
  • Security Features
    Includes robust security tools such as WAF (Web Application Firewall) and DDoS mitigation to protect applications from common vulnerabilities and attacks.
  • Support and Updates
    Provides commercial support with regular updates and technical assistance to address potential issues and maintain optimal performance.
  • Session Persistence
    Supports session persistence to maintain a consistent user experience by directing requests from the same client to the same server.
  • Integrated Monitoring
    Offers integrated monitoring and management tools to help administrators keep track of server performance and issues.

Possible disadvantages of NGINX Plus

  • Cost
    As a commercial product, NGINX Plus comes with licensing fees, which may be expensive for small businesses or projects with budget constraints.
  • Complexity
    Setting up and configuring NGINX Plus can be complex, requiring expertise and possibly a steep learning curve for those unfamiliar with it.
  • Limited Windows Support
    NGINX Plus is primarily designed for Unix-based systems, providing limited support and optimization for Windows environments.
  • Feature Overlap
    Many functionalities in NGINX Plus might overlap with existing solutions in use, which could lead to redundant tools and increased complexity.
  • Dependency on Ecosystem
    NGINX Plus can heavily integrate with other products in its ecosystem, potentially leading to dependencies that can affect flexibility or adaptability.

Traefik features and specs

  • Dynamic Configuration
    Traefik allows for dynamic configuration changes without needing restarts, making it easy to manage in rapidly evolving environments.
  • Kubernetes Integration
    Traefik has native support for Kubernetes, simplifying the process of managing ingress controllers and load balancing in containerized environments.
  • Service Discovery
    It supports automatic service discovery via various backends, including Docker, Consul, and Kubernetes, making it easy to integrate into many architectures.
  • HTTPS Support
    Traefik can automatically obtain and renew SSL/TLS certificates using Let's Encrypt, ensuring secure communications.
  • Middleware
    It supports middleware for handling tasks such as authentication, rate limiting, and retries, offering more control over traffic management.
  • Dashboard
    Traefik includes a built-in dashboard for monitoring and visualizing the routing configuration and health of services.

Possible disadvantages of Traefik

  • Complexity
    The flexibility and range of features can make Traefik complex to configure and understand for beginners.
  • Performance Overhead
    The additional abstraction layer can introduce some performance overhead, which might be a concern in high-performance environments.
  • Limited Advanced Features
    Although Traefik covers many standard use cases, it may lack some advanced features that are found in more specialized load balancers.
  • Documentation
    While improving, the documentation can sometimes be lacking in depth or clarity, which can lead to difficulties in configuration and troubleshooting.
  • Community Support
    Although there is an active community, it may not be as vast or responsive as that of some other more established software like NGINX or HAProxy.
  • Proprietary Features
    Some advanced features are only available in the enterprise edition, which might be a constraint for users looking for a completely open-source solution.

Analysis of Traefik

Overall verdict

  • Traefik is a solid choice for managing and routing microservices traffic. Its lightweight design and broad feature set cater well to containerized and cloud-native environments. However, the final suitability of Traefik depends on specific project needs and architectural requirements, and organizations should evaluate it against their use cases.

Why this product is good

  • Traefik is considered good due to its flexibility, ease of use, and vibrant community. As a modern reverse proxy and load balancer, it is highly compatible with microservices and cloud-native environments. It supports various backends through dynamic configurations, provides seamless integration with Docker and Kubernetes, and offers automated SSL certificate management via Let's Encrypt. Traefik's extensive metrics and dashboarding capabilities also make it a favorable choice for monitoring traffic and performance metrics.

Recommended for

  • Microservices architectures
  • Containerized environments using Docker or Kubernetes
  • Cloud-native applications
  • Projects requiring dynamic and auto-updating configurations
  • Developers in need of automated SSL certificate management

NGINX Plus videos

Master in Nginx | Nginx PlusTutorial | Nginx complete Tutorial -1

More videos:

  • Review - Dynamic Load Balancing with Consul and Nginx Plus

Traefik videos

Traefik: A Scalable and Highly Available Edge Router by Damien Duportalt

More videos:

  • Review - Playing around with Traefik
  • Review - Rocket.Chat on Amazon EKS with Traefik. By Aaron Ogle, Lead Cloud Architect

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to NGINX Plus and Traefik)
Web And Application Servers
Web Servers
9 9%
91% 91
API Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare NGINX Plus and Traefik

NGINX Plus Reviews

We have no reviews of NGINX Plus yet.
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Traefik Reviews

Top 5 Open Source Load Balancers in 2024
Traefik's prowess extends beyond the conventional, equipped with a robust set of middlewares that elevate its capabilities. Going beyond load balancing and reverse proxy roles, Traefik serves as a comprehensive solution for modern cloud-native applications, including API gateway, orchestrator ingress, east-west service communication, and more.
10 Awesome Open Source Load Balancers
Traefik is a reverse proxy and L7 load balancer. Written in Go, it’s designed to support microservices and container-powered services in a distributed system. It has native support for Docker Swarm and Kubernetes orchestration, as well as service registries such as etcd or Consul. It also offers extensive support for WebSocket, HTTP/2, and gRPC services. Traefik integrates...
Top 5 Open-Source Load Balancers 2021
The modern and efficient, Traefik is an open-source reverse proxy and load balancer that provides a simple routing platform without engaging any complexities. Most popular among the Github Fanclub, Traefik owns approximately 27.7k Github stars.
Source: linuxways.net
The 5 Best Open Source Load Balancers
Traefik bills itself as the “cloud native edge router.” It’s a modern microservices-focused application load balancer and reverse proxy written in Golang. With its emphasis on support for several modern container orchestration platforms, batteries-included logging, and several popular metric formats, Traefik is a top choice for container-based microservices architectures.
Source: logz.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Traefik should be more popular than NGINX Plus. It has been mentiond 38 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

NGINX Plus mentions (15)

  • Mastering Microservices: A Hands-On Tutorial with Node.js, RabbitMQ, Nginx, and Docker
    For setting up Nginx as a reverse proxy, you can follow the installation instructions on Nginx's official documentation. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Help finding downloadable Nginx docs in either pdf or text format
    I need to download the Nginx help files directly into my custom data directory, and I know that text or pdf works - not sure about the html version but would try. All I can find is the online content at nginx.com - if I'm missing a download link please help! Source: about 2 years ago
  • kind - Setting up CNI using Calico - Part 7
    $ kubectl run busybox --image=busybox --restart=Never --rm -it -- wget -O- http://nginx If you don't see a command prompt, try pressing enter. Warning: couldn't attach to pod/busybox, falling back to streaming logs: Internal error occurred: error attaching to container: failed to load task: no running task found: task 9268947ec3741ac1bad25fab9454c9c56e51131e7d65098993a87a96ed7ea7d7 not found: not found Connecting... - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Docker networking: Network Namespaces, Docker and DNS
    Docker compose exec nginx_a curl nginx_b Welcome to nginx! Html { color-scheme: light dark; } Body { width: 35em; margin: 0 auto; Font-family: Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; } Welcome to nginx! If you... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Should we tell him?
    The solution is obvious: you should contact nginx.com for help. It says so on that there. Source: almost 3 years ago
View more

Traefik mentions (38)

  • Adventures in Homelabbing: From Cloud Obsession to Self-Hosted Shenanigans
    I began to self-host a Minecraft server using Crafty Controller, an Excalidraw instance, Docmost to replace Notion, Plane to replace Jira, and Penpot to replace Figma. To be able to access them from the internet, I used Nginx Proxy Manager to set up reverse proxies with SSL. You can use Traefik or Caddy instead, but I enjoyed the ease-of-use of NPM. For a dashboard solution, I started with Homarr, but later... - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • Nginx vs Traefik: Which Reverse Proxy is Right for You?
    Before diving into the specifics of Nginx and Traefik, let’s quickly define what a reverse proxy is. A reverse proxy sits between the client (browser or other services) and your backend services (web servers or applications). It handles incoming requests, routes them to the appropriate backend service, and forwards the response to the client. Reverse proxies are typically used for:. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Opening Pandora's Container - How Exposing the Docker Socket Paves the Way to Host Control (Part 1)
    You may wonder why one would even want to expose the Docker socket when there are clearly risks involved. A popular usecase besides accessing remote Docker daemons (which you can actually expose over a TCP socket) are applications that either need control of the daemon to manage other containers, like for example Portainer, or tools that need information about containers for auto discovery purposes, like Traefik.... - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • The Home Server Journey - 3: An Actually Global "Hello"
    I emphasize usually because K3s is different and comes with a Traefik-based ingress controller by default. Taking that into account, as much as I like NGINX outside the container's world, I'd rather keep things simple and use what's already in place. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Running Docker based web applications in Hashicorp Nomad with Traefik Load balancing
    In previous post, we discussed creating a basic Nomad cluster in the Vultr cloud. Here, we will use the cluster created to deploy a load-balanced sample web app using the service discovery capability of Nomad and its native integration with the Traefik load balancer. The source code is available here for the reference. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing NGINX Plus and Traefik, you can also consider the following products

nginx - A high performance free open source web server powering busiest sites on the Internet.

Nginx Proxy Manager - Docker container and built in Web Application for managing Nginx proxy hosts with a simple, powerful interface, providing free SSL support via Let's Encrypt

AWS Elastic Load Balancing - Amazon ELB automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances in the cloud.

BunkerWeb - BunkerWeb is a next-generation and open-source Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Haproxy - Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer

Google Cloud Load Balancing - Google Cloud Load Balancer enables users to scale their applications on Google Compute Engine.

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