List of the Top 7 Web Servers for Netdata in 2025

NGINX Open Source powers more than 400 million websites around the world. Building on this robust foundation, NGINX Plus functions as an all-in-one software solution that combines load balancing, web serving, and content caching capabilities. By choosing NGINX Plus over conventional hardware load balancers, businesses can explore innovative opportunities without the constraints of traditional infrastructure, resulting in savings exceeding 80% while still achieving excellent performance and reliability. This versatile platform can be deployed across various settings, which include public and private clouds, bare metal servers, virtual machines, and containerized environments. Furthermore, the built-in NGINX Plus API streamlines the completion of routine tasks, thereby boosting operational efficiency. In an era where agility is essential, today's NetOps and DevOps teams require a self-service, API-centric approach that integrates smoothly with CI/CD workflows, which not only accelerates application deployments but also enhances the management of application lifecycles. As technology continues to advance rapidly, NGINX Plus emerges as an indispensable resource for improving operational flexibility and optimizing the use of available resources. It is a pivotal asset for organizations aiming to stay competitive in a fast-paced digital world.

Tengine, created by Taobao, the leading e-commerce platform in Asia, is an advanced web server built on the Nginx HTTP server, offering a variety of sophisticated features. Known for its remarkable stability and efficiency, Tengine powers several of the world’s top 100 websites, including its parent company Taobao and Tmall. Since its transition to an open-source project in December 2011, Tengine has flourished, driven by a committed team comprising core members from Taobao, Sogou, and other internet companies, while also encouraging community contributions from developers around the globe. Importantly, Tengine retains all functionalities from Nginx-1.17.3, ensuring seamless compatibility with its predecessor. It supports the CONNECT HTTP method for forward proxying and enhances operational monitoring with features such as asynchronous logging, rollback capabilities, DNS caching, and memory tracking. Additionally, Tengine significantly boosts performance by permitting unbuffered uploads straight to HTTP and FastCGI backend servers, which minimizes disk I/O operations. The server also integrates various load balancing strategies, including consistent hashing, session persistence, and upstream health checks, establishing itself as a robust option for contemporary web applications. There is no doubt that Tengine represents a vital resource for developers in search of a dependable and comprehensive web server solution.

Lighttpd, often referred to as lighty, is a web server distinguished by its emphasis on security, speed, compliance, and versatility, which has transformed server efficiency, particularly in high-performance scenarios. It boasts minimal memory consumption relative to other web servers and excels at managing CPU loads, providing a remarkable suite of functionalities such as FastCGI, SCGI, authentication, output compression, URL rewriting, and many others, making it exceptionally suitable for servers facing significant load challenges. Furthermore, as an open-source solution licensed under the revised BSD license, lighttpd is available to a diverse user base. It also serves as the backbone for many prominent Web 2.0 platforms, showcasing its dependability and effectiveness in practical settings. The server's advanced input/output architecture allows websites to achieve outstanding scalability, greatly surpassing competitors while making efficient use of the same hardware. Overall, lighttpd stands out as a preferred option for developers seeking a robust and efficient web server solution.

NGINX Plus functions as a comprehensive software load balancer, reverse proxy, web server, and content cache, delivering the high-quality features and support that enterprises expect. It is especially popular among contemporary application development and infrastructure teams due to its remarkable efficiency. Renowned as one of the fastest web servers available, NGINX Plus builds upon the strengths of NGINX Open Source by adding essential enterprise features such as active health checks, high availability, DNS service discovery, session persistence, and a RESTful API framework. Its design as a cloud-native and user-friendly solution makes it an excellent choice for reverse proxying, load balancing, and serving as an API gateway. Whether you're aiming to improve monitoring, reinforce security protocols, or oversee Kubernetes container orchestration, NGINX Plus guarantees exceptional support that aligns with the NGINX brand. Furthermore, it provides a scalable and reliable high availability system, complete with monitoring tools that aid in troubleshooting and understanding complex application architectures. In addition to its proactive health checks that consistently assess the condition of upstream servers, NGINX Plus empowers teams to identify and resolve potential challenges effectively before they grow into significant problems, ensuring smooth operations and enhanced performance.

Traefik Enterprise Edition, known as TraefikEE, serves as a cloud-native load balancer and Kubernetes Ingress controller, designed to streamline the intricate networking demands faced by application teams. Built upon the foundation of the open-source Traefik, TraefikEE introduces unique features focused on distributed systems and high availability, making it ideal for production environments with its premium bundled support. This edition allows for clustered setups by segmenting the system into controllers and proxies, thereby enhancing security, scalability, and overall availability. You can deploy applications seamlessly in various environments, whether on-premises or within the cloud. Additionally, it integrates effortlessly with leading infrastructure tools, ensuring a smooth operational experience. The dynamic and automated capabilities of TraefikEE not only save time but also maintain consistency in deploying, managing, and scaling applications. By offering developers enhanced visibility and control over their services, TraefikEE significantly boosts the efficiency of application development and delivery processes, ultimately leading to higher productivity and faster time-to-market. Furthermore, its robust architecture allows organizations to adapt to changing requirements without compromising performance or security.

Apache Tomcat® is a free and open-source software that implements the Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Server Pages, Jakarta Expression Language, Jakarta WebSocket, Jakarta Annotations, and Jakarta Authentication specifications, which are all part of the Jakarta EE framework. This adaptable software plays a crucial role in a wide range of large-scale web applications that various sectors and organizations rely on. Users can share their experiences and insights on the PoweredBy wiki page dedicated to Tomcat. The Apache Tomcat Project is thrilled to unveil version 10.0.10 of Apache Tomcat, which includes updates from the Jakarta EE 9 platform. This latest iteration is designed to boost performance while delivering enhanced features that benefit developers and organizations across the board, ensuring they stay competitive in an evolving digital landscape. With each new release, the community looks forward to further innovations and improvements that will continue to facilitate the development of robust web applications.

Our efficient alternative to Apache conserves resources while maintaining high standards in performance, security, compatibility, and ease of use. LiteSpeed Web Server employs an event-driven design that significantly increases the performance capacity compared to traditional Apache servers. It is adept at managing thousands of simultaneous users while utilizing only a fraction of memory and CPU power. Additionally, it comes pre-configured with ModSecurity rules to safeguard your servers from various threats. Users can benefit from numerous integrated anti-DDoS options, such as bandwidth management and connection rate limiting. By implementing LiteSpeed, you can cut costs by decreasing the number of servers necessary to support your expanding web hosting enterprise or online service. Furthermore, it simplifies your infrastructure by removing the requirement for an HTTPS reverse proxy or separate caching solutions. LiteSpeed Web Server is capable of directly loading Apache configuration files and supports all Apache functionalities, including ModSecurity and the Rewrite Engine, providing seamless transition and operation. This makes it an ideal choice for businesses looking to enhance their server performance while also reducing operational complexity.