Certify The Web vs lego

Certify The Web provides products for requesting, deploying, and renewing TLS certificates. Certificate Manager is intended for Windows servers or desktops, Management Agent for headless Linux and macOS systems, and Management Hub for central administration of multiple instances. The tools support ACME authorities including Let's Encrypt, Google Trust Services, ZeroSSL, Actalis, and private or enterprise CAs. Domain checks can use HTTP or DNS, with options ranging from built-in providers and Certify DNS to manual TXT records or custom scripts. Deployment tasks cover IIS, Apache, nginx, Tomcat, Exchange, ADFS, RDP, Azure App Service, Azure Key Vault, HashiCorp Vault, and IIS Centralized Certificate Store. Other deployments can use scripts, webhooks, SSH/SFTP, or UNC shares. Hub offers a web interface, API, role-based access, managed DNS challenges, and certificate monitoring across instances. A free evaluation has no feature limits or time limit. Cloud-managed licensing starts at $4.99 a month per install; other plans have annual or longer billing terms. Licenses do not bypass certificate authority rate limits.

lego is an independent, free, open-source ACME client and Go library for obtaining, renewing, and revoking certificates. It supports wildcard and SAN certificates and can work with multiple ACME servers, including Let’s Encrypt and ZeroSSL. Validation choices include DNS-01, HTTP-01, TLS-ALPN-01, and DNS-PERSIST-01. The project lists more than 200 DNS providers, including Cloudflare, Amazon Route 53, Google Cloud DNS, and Azure DNS, with CNAME support enabled by default. Users can run lego from the command line or call it as a Go library. DNS credentials and settings are supplied through environment variables, with file references and dotenv files supported. Installation options include prebuilt binaries, Docker, package managers, and source. The maintainers look after the AUR and Snap packages; other listed packages are community maintained. The project lists support for ACME RFC 8555 and certificate validation and renewal extensions. It is licensed under MIT, and installing from source requires Go 1.25 or later. The project points to GitHub issues and discussions for help.