Tool profile
Web server and reverse proxy used for high performance delivery, load balancing, and traffic management.
TLS termination in front of app pools
High-performance web server and reverse proxy: TLS termination, load balancing, caching, and gRPC/HTTP front doors.
Open-source nginx is BSD 2-Clause—free to run. NGINX Plus adds commercial modules, support, and enterprise features under F5 sales quotes. Most teams use Community builds with Let’s Encrypt and Kubernetes Ingress.
Config is powerful—treat nginx.conf like code: review, test, and automate reloads.
Quick fit
Editorial take
NGINX open source and NGINX Plus are different economic products. The core cleanup here is making the OSS server read like OSS, while still acknowledging that F5 sells commercial packaging and support around it.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
Compare with
Pressure-test this pick against nearby alternatives.
Apache Kafka
Free planEvent streaming and event-driven architectures
Open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput pipelines, pub/sub, and stream-processing ecosystems.
Choose Kafka when replayable event streams and ecosystem breadth matter more than the lightest possible operational footprint.
Pricing snapshot
nginx.org describes NGINX Open Source as being distributed under the 2-clause BSD license, so the core web server has no license fee. Commercial NGINX Plus remains an F5 quote-based product. Otherwise, cost comes from the VMs, Kubernetes nodes, load balancers, certificates, and support processes around your deployment.
Arcjet
Free planApplication runtime security
Runtime security toolkit for modern applications and AI systems that helps teams enforce quotas, block bots, prevent prompt abuse, and ship app-level protections in code.
Closer to application-runtime security and abuse-prevention tooling than to classic perimeter appliances.
