Nginx What’s the difference between NGINX (F/OSS) and NGINX Plus?

With today’s release of NGINX F/OSS 1.7.1, it seemed a great moment to explain the differences between our F/OSS and commercial products.

Both products are built by our core engineering team in Moscow, and NGINX F/OSS also benefits from huge community involvement. We issue F/OSS feature releases at a rate of about one per month, and there are over a hundred third-party modules you can compile in to the NGINX F/OSS product, of varying degrees of maturity and compatibility with current releases.


We’re determined to continue to grow the market share of NGINX by building the best possible web server platform. The direction of NGINX F/OSS is very much driven by our end users; SPDY/3.1 is a good illustration of this, as is the inclusion of syslog capabilities in today’s release of 1.7.1. We regularly include community contributions to NGINX F/OSS, though it often takes some time as we’re extremely careful to maintain the reliability and consistency of the core code.

When we announced our commercial product, NGINX Plus, we heard concerns from the community. This feedback has helped us refine our strategy around what goes into the F/OSS and commercial versions of NGINX Plus.

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  The first reason a commercial product exists is because many of our users want support. They value the security of knowing there’s an NGINX expert at the end of an email who is willing and able to assist them, and they value the managed release process that comes with NGINX Plus. They may not want to build and test an NGINX binary themselves, and we’re not confident supporting a binary that someone else has built; therefore, customers who purchase a support subscription receive NGINX Plus.
  
  
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  To increase the value of the commercial product, we add in features that make it easier to manage and monitor. A good example is the real-time status data that NGINX Plus can generate; another is the on-the-fly reconfiguration of load balancing pools. These features are particularly interesting to customers who want an easy-to-use solution without compiling in third-party modules or building supporting tools. There’s no attempt to limit the open-source version, and many of the features we add to NGINX Plus already have third-party implementations that our F/OSS users can use.
  
  We’re building out the application delivery capabilities of NGINX Plus. The session persistence and health monitoring capabilities we added are good examples of this. NGINX Plus is incorporating features that you wouldn’t expect to see in a web server – things that place it in the domain of load balancers or application delivery controllers.
  
  
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  Finally, our users who subscribe to the commercial NGINX Plus product are contributing directly to the ongoing development of the open-source product that is used by over 140 million websites worldwide.
  

We don’t always get it right


We missed our mark by including syslog integration in the NGINX Plus product when the community felt it was table stakes for the F/OSS product. That is why with the release of 1.7.1, the syslog integration has been migrated into the NGINX F/OSS product.

NGINX Plus complements NGINX F/OSS


Our goal is that NGINX Plus complements NGINX F/OSS. It complements it by offering a supported, tested version, and it complements it by providing a load-balancing front end for your clusters of NGINX F/OSS. Thank you for helping us find that balance.

You can find more about the 1.7.1 release at NGINX.org, and you may like to review the NGINX and NGINX Plus release process to get a perspective on how the F/OSS and commercial products are related.

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