Introduction
Caddy and Nginx are two of the most popular web servers and reverse proxies in the world, and they are often the first choice when a project outgrows a basic development server. Both are capable, battle-tested and free, yet they take very different philosophies to configuration and operations.
Nginx is the entrenched workhorse — a C-written server that powers some of the largest sites on the internet and is prized for raw performance and a vast module ecosystem. Caddy is the newer challenger, written in Go, that promises to make the everyday parts of running a web server (especially TLS) genuinely painless.
Background
Nginx (pronounced “engine-x”) was created in 2004 by Igor Sysoev and became famous for handling high connection loads with a small memory footprint using an event-driven architecture. It is now maintained by F5 and remains the default choice for many reverse-proxy and load-balancing setups.
Caddy was created by Matt Holt and first released in 2015. Its defining feature is automatic HTTPS — it obtains and renews certificates from Let’s Encrypt out of the box — and its Caddyfile configuration language is designed to be readable and approachable.
Performance
In our reverse-proxy benchmarks, Nginx and Caddy are both excellent, and the gap narrows constantly. Nginx’s event-driven, C-based core still delivers the highest raw throughput and the lowest idle memory use, which matters at enormous scale. Caddy is a close second and, in many real-world proxy workloads, the difference is imperceptible.
Where Caddy pull ahead in our testing was developer time: features that require external tools, scripts or multiple configuration blocks in Nginx (TLS, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, automatic redirects) are simple directives in Caddy.
Configuration
This is where the two tools most diverge. A Caddyfile is intentionally human-friendly:
example.com {
encode zstd gzip
tls {
on_demand
}
reverse_proxy /api/* localhost:8080
}Nginx’s configuration is powerful but verbose, and correctness often depends on subtle syntax:
server {
listen 443 ssl http2;
server_name example.com;
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/fullchain.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/example.com/privkey.pem;
location /api/ {
proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
}
}For a team that values readability and onboarding, Caddy’s approach is a clear win. For teams that need very fine control over connection handling, header manipulation or load balancing, Nginx’s mature directives remain unmatched.
Ecosystem and community
Nginx has the advantage here. Decades of deployment mean an enormous library of third-party modules, countless blog posts, and answers to almost any problem you can imagine. If you need a specific feature, someone has likely built it.
Caddy’s ecosystem is growing quickly, and its Go-based architecture makes extension relatively easy, but it is still smaller. Some advanced or niche requirements may require plugins you have to vet yourself.
Pricing
Both are open source and free to self-host. The real cost is operational — time spent configuring, securing and maintaining each server. On that axis, Caddy’s automation tends to reduce the ongoing burden, while Nginx’s maturity reduces risk for teams already operating it.
Verdict
Choose Nginx if you are running very high-traffic infrastructure, need a tiny memory footprint, or rely on a mature module ecosystem and battle-tested behaviour.
Choose Caddy if you are starting a new project, value developer ergonomics, and want automatic TLS and HTTP/3 without extra tooling. It is a genuinely modern, pleasant way to run a web server, and its gap with Nginx is closing every release.
Our own recommendation for a greenfield project today: start with Caddy for its simplicity, and reach for Nginx only when you have a specific, measurable reason to do so.