NGINX vs. Payara Server

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
Payara Server
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Payara Server is a fully supported, developer-friendly, open source application server. The vendor says Payara Server’s architecture is innovative, cloud-native and optimized for production deployments. The application server is built and supported by a team of DevOps engineers dedicated to the continued development and maintenance of the open source software and committed to optimizing Payara Server for production Java EE applications. Key features of Payara Server include: •…N/A
Pricing
NGINXPayara Server
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
NGINXPayara Server
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
NGINXPayara Server
Features
NGINXPayara Server
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
NGINX
7.8
Ratings
2% below category average
Payara Server
7.5
Ratings
5% below category average
IDE support7.20 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Security management8.00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Administration and management7.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Application server performance8.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Installation9.70 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance7.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
NGINXPayara Server
Small Businesses
Apache HTTP Server
Apache HTTP Server
Score 8.4 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 7.9 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Apache Tomcat
Apache Tomcat
Score 7.9 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
NGINXPayara Server
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
NGINXPayara Server
Likelihood to Recommend
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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Payara Server is recommended for any type of jee and/or Spring application. Unless there are proprietary framework restrictions there is no reason for not using Payara. The pricing model for enterprise support is very nice and I would definitely recommend it. The case where it is least recommended is when you need a separate application server per service. In this case, there might be better options for this job even though I am not very sure and need to test more.
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Pros
  • 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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  • Small memory footprint.
  • Fully JEE compliant with an exceptional administration console.
  • Very good performance.
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Cons
  • 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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  • Issues that are logged in Payara GitHub forum need to address on time, but it keeps on postponing fixing those issues.
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Likelihood to Renew
Great value for the product
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No answers on this topic
Usability
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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As mentioned before it has an amazing configuration console. You can practically do anything from there and even update the program or install new features on the fly.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
As mentioned before, its performance capabilities were one of the reasons we used them. It interacts with mass mail software and we see no performance impact. It handles everything pretty well and pretty fast.
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Support Rating
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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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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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- As I said before, Payara has full Jakarta compliance and provide up-to-date technology stack upgrade. - Easy to install and upgrade. - Very less configuration setting. - Default ready-to-use production domain is available, which can be spun up to use in production.
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Return on Investment
  • 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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  • Can host multiple application on single VM.
  • Helps managed service team reduces their time on installation and up-gradation ( upgrading it to a new Payara server is very simple).
  • We can opt for Payara or Micro Payara based on the application size.
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ScreenShots

NGINX Screenshots

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

Payara Server Screenshots

Screenshot of