Fabio vs Pound
Fabio
github.comPound
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Fabio | Pound |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 0 |
| Spec score · Reverse Proxy Software | 8.8 (#4) | 7.1 (#25) |
| Integrations | The project README says Fabio integrates with Consul, Vault, Amazon ELB, and Amazon API Gateway. | Optional build support includes Lua extensions, DNS-based dynamic backends, and Perl-compatible regular expressions through PCRE or PCRE2. |
| Metrics | The feature page lists support for Graphite, StatsD/DataDog, and Circonus metrics. | A special backend can generate an OpenMetrics telemetry response. |
| Purpose | Fabio is an HTTP and TCP reverse proxy that configures itself with data from Consul. | Pound is a reverse proxy, load balancer, and HTTPS front end for web servers. |
| Security | The README says release hashes are signed with a PGP key and describes TLS certificate verification behavior for upstream HTTPS connections. | The project describes Pound as a small program that can run setuid/setgid or in a chroot jail and does not access the hard disk except to read certificate files at startup when required. |
Plans
In their own words
Fabio
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.