IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition vs. NGINX

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
Score 6.7 out of 10
N/A
WebSphere Hybrid Edition from IBM is a collection of WebSphere application runtimes and modernization tools that provides support for on-premise and major public cloud deployments, in virtual machines, containers and Kubernetes. The user can choose any WebSphere edition and deploy Liberty and application modernization tools to help move to a cloud-native architecture, modernize existing applications and support an existing WebSphere estate.
$88.50
per month
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
NGINX, a business unit of F5 Networks, powers over 65% of the world's busiest websites and web applications. NGINX started out as an open source web server and reverse proxy, built to be faster and more efficient than Apache. Over the years, NGINX has built a suite of infrastructure software products o tackle some of the biggest challenges in managing high-transaction applications. NGINX offers a suite of products to form the core of what organizations need to create…N/A
Pricing
IBM WebSphere Hybrid EditionNGINX
Editions & Modules
Application Server
$88.50
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM WebSphere Hybrid EditionNGINX
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM WebSphere Hybrid EditionNGINX
Features
IBM WebSphere Hybrid EditionNGINX
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
IBM WebSphere Hybrid Edition
7.3
Ratings
8% below category average
NGINX
7.8
Ratings
2% below category average
IDE support5.40 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Security management8.20 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Administration and management7.80 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Application server performance8.10 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Installation7.50 Ratings9.70 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance6.60 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM WebSphere Hybrid EditionNGINX
Small Businesses
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 7.8 out of 10
Enterprises
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 7.8 out of 10
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User Ratings
IBM WebSphere Hybrid EditionNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.5
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.7
(0 ratings)
8.1
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM WebSphere Hybrid EditionNGINX
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM WebSphere Hybrid edition is well-suited for the development and deployment of large enterprise-level applications such as Electronic Health Records that are used in our organization. IBM WebSphere is appropriate for organizations that require strong security and compliance as it provides a high level of security and compliance features. This works well with organizations that are subject to strict regulatory requirements, such as hospitals.
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Nginx is well suited for serving any static content - whether that be images, JS files, HTML files, CSS files, videos, etc. If you have a high-traffic website, Nginx will be a great fit because it handles large number of requests extremely efficiently. Nginx has full support on Unix systems, but only has limited support on Microsoft Windows machines.
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Pros
  • It works out of the box. Its basic functionality is all there and everything works with no adjustments.
  • The functionality is there for fine tuning, to allow applications to be easier to access and quicker with some tweaks, but again, these aren't necessary for basic running.
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  • Straight-forward configuration format that users of all skill levels can learn, and yet is powerful enough for the huge breadth of features that Nginx provides.
  • Massive scale right out the box. We've never had a Nginx instance overwhelmed by requests, and if we did it would be trivial to spin up more Nginx instances to handle the load.
  • SSL termination means that we can deliver content over HTTPS without needing our individual services to require TLS support. This saves us a lot of time and headache while keeping us secure.
  • Nginx is open-source and free, meaning that anyone can use it to power their services, from individual projects to billion-dollar websites.
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Cons
  • In this era of cloud technology, Websphere Application Server required Integration with cloud technology.
  • Troubleshooting tools need to included in Websphere Application Server package for better troubleshooting of issues.
  • Websphere Application Server comes with some basic performance tools and these troubleshooting and performance tools need to be enhanced.
  • It's available in all operating systems like Windows AIX Unix Solaris Zos etc.
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  • Nginx often requires some initial configuration. It's worth doing, because you'll end up with great results, but it can be slightly daunting for someone to get started using it. Apache might have a leg up in that regard--When you install Apache, typically it's just about ready to do what you want already. But the issue with Apache is that most people skip the extensive tuning phase required after that, and with nginx it becomes more just a part of the configuration process.
  • Sometimes, the configuration syntax, even though it's powerful and terse, isn't the most intuitive. Luckily there's plenty of documentation about what things mean and how to accomplish certain things. There may not be much that can be done about this--to have a powerful web server, you need a powerful-enough configuration language.
  • The nginx brand is somewhat fragmented, and it can be confusing. There's the open source nginx web server, which I've primarily been referring to. But then there's NGINX Plus, a premium subscription-based service which works with a range of other NGINX products (NGINX WAF, NGINX Amplify, NGINX Controller). I've met a number of people who weren't very familiar with nginx, and instinctively went to nginx.com first, and from there it seems like everything costs money. It's only when they realize there's a different site, nginx.org, that they find what they went looking for.
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Likelihood to Renew
Mostly we will be renewing unless the strategic direction changes drastically or there are other complelling external circumstances. We've been on a multi year project to modernize our legacy applications and that effort will continue for the foreseeable future.
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Great value for the product
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Usability
WebSphere Application Server is used across our organization. Most projects use this for Java products and applications. Being robust and scalable makes it even more usable. We love using WebSphere Application Server due to its configuration management ability made simple and vast across all java related parameters. It is dependent on the features and upgrades and IBM releases some great upgrades to WebSphere Application Server.
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Front end proxy and reverse proxy of Nginx is always useful. I always prefer to Nginx in overall usability when you have application server and database or multiple application servers and single database i.e. clustered application. Nginx provides really good features and flexibility which helps the system administrator in case of troubleshooting and also from the administration perspective. Also, Nginx doesn't delay any request because of internal performance issues.
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Performance
Deploys fairly quick enough and like the roll-out update feature decreasing the downtime and also plays well with other integration tools as well.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
IBM was quick to respond when we had an issue with our specific infrastructure. We raised a PMR, which they picked up quickly and updated us about every step of the way. We had an appropriate fix for quite a business critical issue within a fortnight, which was impressive!
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Community support is great, and they've also had a presence at conferences. Overall, there is no shortage of documentation and community support. We're currently using it to serve up some WordPress sites, and configuring NGINX for this purpose is well documented.
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Alternatives Considered
I did not choose IBM WAS, it was a coporate decision. We are glad that we have been using this for a number of years and are quite happy as a corporation. However, it does take more time to learn WAS because of its complexity in terms of installation, various features and special deployment and packaging needs.
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I have found that [NGINX] seems to perform better throughout the years with less issues although I've used Apache more. I would definitely recommend [NGINX] for any high volume site and I've seen this to usually be the case from most provided web hosts who will pick [NGINX] over alternatives
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Return on Investment
  • It has security features that has enhanced security of our enterprise and its data.
  • WebSphere Hybrid Edition has improved performance making it easier for our organization to fix any problem that might occur.
  • It has improved collaboration enhancing team work making the work efficient.
  • WebSphere Hybrid Edition can be complex to individuals who are not familiar with it.
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  • When we first migrated our primary bidding environment architecture to Nginx, it was under duress due to Apache's inability to keep up when we consolidated away from an HAproxy model to a central HTTP proxy. So we even when we did not know what we were doing, we were able to make it work in a bad situation, and everyone was quite happy.
  • The biggest complaint I have is that I find the module compilation requirements for nginx+ rather burdensome. If we pay for Nginx+, I'd love to see then have pre-built modules for ready for each release of more modules. We are spending our own time engineering an in-house solution for module testing for nginx+ releases, which is disappointing.
  • I've also, as the primary Nginx person at my organization, inserted my expertise into other projects, and have saved our company lots of money getting rid of big $$$ appliances for general SSL proxying.
  • Speaking of Nginx replacing SSL appliances, we had an instance where we had to suddenly enable elliptic-curve SSL ciphers and our big $$$ appliances (you know who they are), were falling over. Even their SSL accelerator cards, after all, are just a few extra cores to process SSL. But in an environment of our size, we use DNS to spread the load to hundreds of frontend proxies with dozens of cores each to spread this load out, all at a lower price than ONE of the appliance pairs running Nginx. We couldn't even tell the change in load in our Nginx architecture when we enabled the ciphers.
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ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

Screenshot of Overview of the NGINX Application PlatformScreenshot of NGINX Controller - MonitoringScreenshot of NGINX Controller - Configuration