Best self-hosted web servers
Web Servers and Reverse Proxies. A [web server](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_server) is a piece of software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via [HTTP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol) (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant [HTTPS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTPS). A [Reverse Proxy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_proxy) is a proxy server that appears to any client to be an ordinary web server, but in reality merely acts as an intermediary that forwards requests to one or more ordinary web servers.
We track 19 self-hosted web servers projects. The median health score in this category is 75, against 10 projects rated healthy or better and none currently flagged as at risk. The table below is ordered by health score, not popularity — the most starred project in a category is frequently not the best maintained one.
| # | Project | Health | Activity | Stars | Built with | Last release |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Pangolin Identity-aware tunneled reverse proxy with dashboard UI, access control, and WireGuard-based tunnels (alternative to Clo | Thriving · 90 | 23k | Docker | 16 Sept 2026 | |
| 2 | Traefik HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. | Thriving · 87 | 65k | Go, Docker | 4 Sept 2026 | |
| 3 | BunkerWeb Next-gen Web Application Firewall (WAF) that will protect your web services. | Thriving · 84 | 11k | deb, Docker | 25 Sept 2026 | |
| 4 | go-doxy Lightweight, simple, and performant reverse proxy with WebUI, Docker integration, automatic shutdown/startup for contai | Thriving · 84 | 4.2k | Docker, Go | 19 Sept 2026 | |
| 5 | Nginx Proxy Manager Docker container for managing Nginx proxy hosts with a simple, powerful interface. | Thriving · 82 | 34k | Docker | 24 Sept 2026 | |
| 6 | Ferron Fast, memory-safe web server written in Rust. | Thriving · 82 | 2.2k | Rust, Docker | 24 Sept 2026 | |
| 7 | Zoraxy General purpose HTTP reverse proxy and forwarding tool. | Healthy · 76 | 5.5k | Go, Docker | 27 Sept 2026 | |
| 8 | NGINX HTTP and reverse proxy server, mail proxy server, and generic TCP/UDP proxy server. | Healthy · 75 | 32k | C, deb | 15 Sept 2026 | |
| 9 | Pomerium Identity-aware reverse proxy, successor to now obsolete oauthproxy. It inserts an OAuth step before proxying your reques | Healthy · 73 | 5k | Go, Docker | 9 Sept 2026 | |
| 10 | Caddy Powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS. | Healthy · 70 | 76k | Go, deb | 3 Jun 2026 | |
| 11 | Algernon Small self-contained pure-Go web server with Lua, Markdown, HTTP/2, QUIC, Redis and PostgreSQL support. | Steady · 67 | 3k | Go, Docker | 26 Jul 2026 | |
| 12 | SWAG (Secure Web Application Gateway) Nginx webserver and reverse proxy with PHP support, built-in Certbot (Let's Encrypt) client and fail2ban integration. | Steady · 66 | 3.7k | Docker | 26 Sept 2026 | |
| 13 | SafeLine Web application firewall / reverse proxy to protect your web apps from attacks and exploits. | Steady · 58 | 23k | Docker | 3 Sept 2026 | |
| 14 | Static Web Server Cross-platform, high-performance, and asynchronous web server for static file serving. | Steady · 57 | 2.4k | Rust, Docker | 31 Jul 2026 | |
| 15 | UUSEC WAF Industry-leading high-performance, AI and semantic technology web application firewall and API security gateway (fork of | Steady · 53 | 1.7k | C, Lua | 5 Aug 2026 | |
| 16 | Apache HTTP Server Secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards. | Unrated | — | C, deb | — | |
| 17 | HAProxy Very fast and reliable reverse-proxy offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based app | Unrated | — | C, deb | — | |
| 18 | Lighttpd Secure, fast, compliant, and very flexible web server that has been optimized for high-performance environments. | Unrated | — | C, deb | — | |
| 19 | Vinyl Cache Web application accelerator/caching HTTP reverse proxy (formerly Varnish). | Unrated | — | Go, deb | — |
Which one should you run?
If you want the safest bet on longevity, Pangolin is the best-maintained project in this category right now at 90/100. Traefik is the closest runner-up (87/100) — see the side-by-side comparison.
A health score measures whether a project is alive and shipping. It does not measure whether it has the feature you need. Use it to rule options out, then compare on features.