Fabio vs freenginx

Fabio is a self-hosted HTTP and TCP reverse proxy that builds its routing from Consul service data. Services can announce accepted paths with tags such as `urlprefix-/user`; Fabio then refreshes its routing table when Consul changes, without restarting or reloading. Its main role is distributing incoming HTTP(S) and TCP traffic from the internet to frontend services. It is not intended for frontend-to-backend or backend-to-backend routing, where Consul service discovery is used instead. Fabio provides route-specific access control, authorization, customizable logs, redirects, compression, header injection, path changes, WebSockets, server-sent events, and transparent gRPC proxying. It supports TLS termination, dynamic certificate stores, HTTPS upstreams, raw TCP, TCP-SNI forwarding, and traffic shaping by percentage. A web UI shows the active routes, with metrics integrations. Fabio is free, open-source software for Linux, macOS, and Windows, and requires Consul for service discovery.

freenginx is an effort to preserve free and open development of server software used for HTTP, mail, and TCP/UDP proxying. Its HTTP server can serve static files, reverse proxy with caching, balance load, and provide fault tolerance. It supports SSL/TLS SNI, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3, along with access controls based on client IP address, HTTP Basic authentication, or a subrequest result. Cached and accelerated connections are available for FastCGI, uwsgi, SCGI, and memcached servers. The mail proxy supports IMAP, POP3, and SMTP authentication methods with SSL and STARTTLS/STLS. TCP and UDP proxying includes load balancing, fault tolerance, and client-address access control. The process design uses one master and several workers running under an unprivileged user. Configuration can be reloaded and the executable upgraded without interrupting client service. Source and documentation are distributed under a 2-clause BSD-like license. The software is self-hosted and uses file-based configuration; downloads include source, Windows builds, and mainline and stable versions.