Open Source Alternatives to F5 NGINX Plus

An API infrastructure solution that functions as a cloud-native load balancer, reverse proxy, web server, content cache, and API gateway. It is designed for platform teams to deliver, secure, and scale applications, APIs, Kubernetes services, and AI workloads across distributed, hybrid multi-cloud environments. The software manages unpredictable inference traffic, maintains consistent policies across various environments, and improves reliability under load to reduce the operational overhead of serving modern apps. It is deployed as a core component of the NGINX One ecosystem, which integrates the data plane with SaaS based tools for observability, management, and security. The product supports the implementation of unified API gateways and ingress controllers across Kubernetes environments to provide insights into application health and performance. It is used to protect apps and APIs from layer 7 attacks when paired with complementary security solutions.

Whether you want to cut software costs or escape vendor lock-in, these open source alternatives to F5 NGINX Plus give you an option you fully own. You can self-host them, so your data stays on infrastructure you control. This page lists 3 open source alternatives to F5 NGINX Plus. The most popular are Caddy, Traefik and Zoraxy. Most use the AGPL-3.0 or Apache-2.0 license, and 3 offer an official Docker image.